Have a Holly Jolly Monkmas
by Bob Wright
Summary: Who would poison one of Julie's friends? Who would blow up Ambrose's house? Is Natalie's husband alive and back? And will the stockings ever be perfectly hung by the chimney with care? Just a few of the questions for Monk to answer this Christmas. NO
1. A Holiday Tragedy

Have a Holly Jolly Monkmas

By

Bob Wright

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Here I may be taking several risks for the first time in my series of Monk stories. For one, I'm not entirely sure the poisonous concoction you're about to see in action would actually work in real life. If you know basic chemistry, you'll probably know how it's supposed to work. Plus, it's very possible (bordering on likely) that some of the things I bring up on the conclusion of this story may be refuted once we know the full story about how Trudy died. Right now, there's nothing that absolutely says it can't be the case (and I don't think it's something the producers are really considering at this moment, to be sure), so I'm going to roll the dice with it when the time comes.

Adrian Monk and all related characters and indicia are registered trademarks of USA Network, Mandeville Films, and Touchstone Television. And now, as always, sit back and enjoy the story.

A cold fog had settled in over San Francisco since the beginning of December. It trickled into just about every corner of the city, but didn't diminish the spectacular light displays that had started lighting up the city since Thanksgiving and were now reaching their peak of splendor.

Adrian Monk could have cared less about the lights at the moment, however. Even though he was standing right by the big window in the gym at James Sutter Middle School, and thus had a perfect view of several big displays, he was more interested in the poorly cleaned windows. He scrubbed away at several streak marks, determined to fix the job for the janitor.

"Mr. Monk?" came his assistant's voice in his ear, "Mr. Monk, it doesn't have to be perfect."

"Well, I think everyone else would like it to be perfect," Adrian gestured around to the numerous sixth through eighth graders dancing to music he found to definitely be not along his tastes. None of them had, to be honest, even noticed the windows since he'd arrived for the dance, but he knew they'd care deep down about the streaks as he did.

"Come on," Natalie Teeger took his arm and gently led away from the window, "We're supposed to be watching the kids."

"Remind me what I'm doing here again?" Adrian had to ask. He had no idea why he'd come in the first place, and the large crowd of kids was making him feel a little nervous.

"Because Julie asked you to come, and you agreed you'd make her happy," Natalie told him, "It's only for about four more hours."

"Four more hours, just four more hours," Adrian took several reassuring breaths. One thing was certain; chaperoning was NOT up his alley. "Ex, Excuse me," he said, taking aside a boy who'd been dancing nearby and straightening his tie. "You'll thank me later," he told him. The boy gave him a strange look and went back about his business. The detective glanced at his watch. "The caterers are late," he announced out loud to no one in particular.

"I know, Mr. Monk," Julie Teeger had come up behind him unexpectedly, "I don't get it; they're usually on time for dances."

"So you're Detective Adrian Monk," the red-haired girl who was with Julie asked him, "My dad talks about you a lot. He says you're crazy."

"I'm sure he does, and he's probably right," Adrian agreed. He stared at the girl. "Do I know you? You look familiar."

"My parents are Eric and Rochelle Hart," she told him.

"Oh, oh, I know them," Adrian said, shivering. He knew them all too well. "Nice people, very nice."

"Here we go," Julie pointed to a table being wheeled in by several people in white suits. On it were rolls, cheeses, cookies, and other snacks to go with the obligatory punch bowl.

"All right, this is what I'm talking about!" the other girl eagerly picked up a paper cup and scooped up a glass of punch. Julie helped herself to some of the cookies. "You, you might want some healthy stuff to go with it," Adrian pointed out, gesturing toward several plates of salad.

"Maybe later, "Julie was disinterested in salad at the moment, "Come on Clarissa, I think the couples contest's starting soon."

The two of them walked off. Adrian gave the table a good looking over. His first order of business was to rearrange the decorative nutcrackers so they were all in a straight line. Then he took all the rolls off their plate and started putting them back on so they were in concentric circles.

"Mr. Monk, please!" Natalie took the plate out of his reach, "They don't care!"

"I do," Adrian said in self-defense, "I don't want to live in a world where I can't rearrange someone else's rolls."

A loud blast of music from the speakers made him cringe. "Who ordered this?" he shouted out loud.

"It's Eminem," another nearby boy told him, "Haven't you ever heard of him?"

"Oh sure," Adrian lied, "I love his song where he's loving that woman all night long."

"Perhaps it would be best if you just waited over here for the rest of the dance, Mr. Monk,' Natalie led him over to the far wall. Once they were there, her tone got friendlier. "So, did you ever attend any dances when you were a kid?" she asked him.

"A couple of times," Adrian admitted, "in my dreams."

"I guess no one ever really invited you, then?"

"If they would, it probably wouldn't have been Trudy I ended up with," the detective said, "If any girl had asked my out, my…"

Suddenly a scream permeated the gym. Both of them turned in its general direction as the music came to an abrupt halt. A large clump of kids had gathered in a circle around whoever was being affected, but even from where they were standing, they could tell someone was in the middle of terrible convulsions. "Somebody get a doctor!" someone cried out.

Adrian and Natalie rushed forward, pushing their way through the crowd. When they reached the center, a horrible sight awaited them: the red-haired girl that had been with Julie was lying on the floor, shaking wildly and coughing up blood. "Quick, somebody do CPR!" another chaperone at them.

"CPR?" Adrian cringed at the thought of putting his lips against those of someone coughing up blood, "I think we'd better wait for someone trained at it to…"

The girl's convulsions abruptly stopped and she went limp. The chaperone felt for her pulse and shook his head. "Too late," he muttered, "She's gone."

"Gone," Adrian stared with horror at the dead body before him. Why did this have to happen?


	2. Old Friends Return

Within twenty minutes the police arrived on the scene. Captain Leland Stottlemeyer quickly blocked off all the exits. "Go find the guys who brought the food," he instructed his officers, "I want a good long word with them. Get this punch down to the lab; I want whatever they put in it analyzed ASAP."

Several officers pushed the concession table with the punch out the door. Stottlemeyer walked up to the former detective. "So what do you think, Monk?" he asked him.

"About the case?" Adrian asked.

"No, what the pope does when he's taking a shower; yes, the case!" Stottlemeyer groaned.

"Well, I think some blood-thinning drug of some kind had to have been put in for her to cough it up," Adrian theorized, "Probably warfarin. I'm guessing from how fast she died that they put a lot of it in there."

"This could have been worse," Natalie told Stottlemeyer, "I looked; Clarissa was the only one to take a drink from the bowl before it happened. Otherwise we might have had a higher body count."

"Captain," Lieutenant Randall Disher jogged up, "The caterers left before it happened. We're calling the company to see who they assigned here."

"Well for all we know they may well have not known," Stottlemeyer mused, "Someone may have spiked it when they weren't looking, in which case…"

The door to the gym slammed open. A large well-built man ran in looking terrified. "Are you in charge?" he asked Stottlemeyer breathlessly, "They called me at home; tell me it's not…!"

"You're Eric Hart?" the captain asked him.

The man nodded. "I'm sorry," Stottlemeyer put a sympathetic hand on his shoulder, "There wasn't much that could have been done."

"Oh God, why?" Mr. Hart sank to his knees and collapsed into hysterics, "Why did it have to be her out of hundreds of…OH GOD!"

"I want you to know that I've got some of my best men on this," Stottlemeyer told him, "One of them happened to be here at the time it happened and he's an expert at these things."

"I hope you don't…" Mr. Hart looked up and saw Adrian standing off to the side. His expression immediately hardened. "Not Monk," he told Stottlemeyer firmly, "I don't want him on this."

"Detective Monk is one of the best minds in this city and I think he is well-qualified to…" Stottlemeyer started to say.

"Captain, read my lips: I don't want Monk!" Mr. Hart shouted, "I don't want to see him on this case, or I'll file an injunction against both you and him, got it?"

"Sure, no problem," the captain said numbly.

"Come on, why don't we go get a statement?" Disher took Mr. Hart's hand and led him off. "Well, that went well," Natalie commented, "He's got a serious problem."

"Not really," Adrian said, "Just never really got along with him in school. He and his wife were in the popular group, so you can guess what they thought about me."

He sighed deeply at the thought of past memories. Over in the corner he could a glimpse of Julie balled up and in the middle of hysterics of her own. "Why don't you go talk to her?" Natalie whispered in his ear.

"Me?" Adrian frowned, "I don't….I…I'm not a guidance counselor."

"She trusts you," Natalie flashed him a look that he couldn't refuse. Adrian shrugged his shoulders several times and walked over to the girl. "Hey, it was a nice dance anyway," he blurted out the first thing that popped into his mind.

"I've known her since we were four,' Julie didn't care about how good the dance might have been, "She didn't deserve it to happen to her! I already miss her terribly!"

"I understand, Julie, and all I can say is…all I can say is…" Adrian thought frantically for something, ANYTHING to be able to say in comfort, "…all I can say is…enjoy it now, because the pain only gets worse through time."

Needless to say, this did not make Julie feel any better. She flashed him a painful, teary look that made him shiver and rushed off sobbing even harder. Adrian stood frozen in disappointment. He'd never wanted to see that look from anyone.

* * *

"'The pain only gets worse through time,' Mr. Monk?" Natalie was still chiding him about it the next afternoon.

"I told you I'm not a grief counselor," Adrian protested, rearranging the balls on the Teeger family Christmas tree, "And it's true, the pain only gets worse. I know that firsthand." He turned to face her. "And I think you do too."

Natalie grew silent, nodding slowly. Adrian knew he'd made a point. "Is she feeling any better?" he asked her.

"She doesn't want to get out of bed," Natalie shook her head, "They'd been friends for almost a decade."

"I can't blame her," Adrian made some hand measurements with the tree, then began pulling the strands of lights into positions where they were equally distant from each other, "I stayed in bed for three years after I lost Trudy."

"I'm counting on you to solve this one for her," Natalie told him, "She deserves a closure."

"I'd like to, but you heard what Eric said, he doesn't want me on the case," Adrian said, screwing in a loose bulb.

"Forget what he said!" Natalie snapped, "He's an idiot anyway. We don't even have to tell him. You could be behind the scenes."

Before Adrian could respond to this, the doorbell rang. "Oh," he said, a slight smile coming to his face, "I forgot; they were coming in today; we were supposed to get them at the airport."

He left the tree and walked toward the door. This was a moment he'd been waiting for for several months now. He took a deep breath at the door before opening it and saying, "Hello Sharona, how was your flight?"

"Where were you Adrian?" Sharona Fleming growled, "The cabdriver stiffed me for ten dollars I'd still have if you'd shown up on time!"

"We've had a bit of a tragedy lately; hello Sharona," Natalie waved at her. She'd frequently called Sharona over the last several months since their first meeting in Chicago whenever she'd felt lost by Adrian's mannerisms. "Let me take your suitcases there," she said, relieving the nurse of them, "Was your flight in smooth?"

"All except for a stretch over the Rockies," Sharona collapsed onto the sofa, "I'll tell you, all those years I operated on Pacific time, now it's so hard to get used to it again."

"Hey Mr. Monk," Benjy Fleming had filed in after his mother, "Look what I've been doing."

He handed the detective a thick stacked of papers. Adrian looked at the cover, which read OBSESSIVE: THE STORY OF ADRIAN MONK, A SCRIPT BY BENJAMIN FLEMING. "You making a movie of me?" he asked, intrigued.

"One of my friend's dad's a member of the Writer's Guild; he says he'll make a provision for me if I finish it," Benjy told him, "Your life's just made for the movies."

"Interesting," Adrian leafed through it, "At least I know it's in the hands of someone I can trust. What exactly is this about?"

"Your big comeback," Benjy said, "I'm starting it when you were still on the force, and it goes through your big comeback when you worked on the mayor's case."

"He's been working hard at it for three months," Sharona smiled at him, "I think it'll work as well."

"I don't know if I'd say this," Adrian frowned at one particular page of dialogue, "Or this."

"So is she here?" Benjy asked Natalie. He'd become a constant Internet correspondent with Julie since their day and a half of captivity together in Chicago; indeed, Julie had made a point of writing to him with details of every case Adrian had solved.

"Upstairs, but she's not really in a happy mood," Natalie told him, "One of her friends died last night."

"It wasn't pretty at all, trust me on that," Adrian said, squinting at a line of direction in the script, "Who's this guy? I never met anyone with that name."

"Adrian, it's a fictional work," Sharona told him as her son went upstairs, "It's not supposed to be true word for word."

"Oh," Adrian put the script down in the exact center of the kitchen table. "So, I guess he's not traumatized anymore, then?" he asked. He could only imagine the pain Benjy had gone through watching his father shoot his mother right in front of him.

"He's getting better now," Sharona told him, "Now that I'm working at Bellevue, I got the top psychiatrist there to work it over with him. He's starting to come out of it now, but for a while he closed up completely. He was glad to come back here, though. There's no bad memories out here for him."

"And it's good to have him back her for Christmas vacation, even for only two weeks," Adrian couldn't help smiling himself.

The phone rang. Natalie picked it up. "Hello? Oh, OK. The lieutenant," she whispered to the two of them, "So that's what it was? I see. You sure? OK, we'll be waiting on the porch."

She hung up. "They've identified the poison that killed Clarissa," she told Adrian, "You were right, warfarin was in it. So was rat poison, paint thinner, and—get this—a byproduct of toxic nuclear waste."

"Nuclear waste?" Adrian frowned, "Then why weren't we all killed?"

The lieutenant says the radioactive properties were taken out before it was added to the punch," Natalie explained, "Whoever put it in there was an expert chemist."

"What's this all about?" Sharona interceded.

"Last night we witnessed a tragic death," Adrian told her. He related the full events of the previous evening to her, closing with, "I kind of don't have a choice but to help solve it, or Natalie'll kill me."

"I didn't say I'd kill you," Natalie said, but she had a glint in her expression that hinted she might, "Anyway, he and the captain are coming by in ten minutes. The only place with nuclear waste around here is the Howard Nuclear Power Plant in San Jose, so we're going to check it out to see if any of their waste happens to be missing."

"Nuclear power plant," Adrian frowned, "With toxic waste? We're going to need more than ten minutes; I've got to go back to my apartment and prepare."

"Prepare? Prepare for what?"

"I can't just go into a toxic waste plant unprotected," the detective protested.

"I'll take him," Sharona rolled her eyes, "We'll never get there if we don't. Give me your car keys."

Natalie tossed them to her. "Come on Adrian," the nurse gestured toward the door, "I can't believe it; I'm here only ten minutes and already I'm babying you again!"

"Feels good doesn't it, reliving old times," Adrian told her. He for one was going to enjoy Christmas vacation this year.


	3. Missing Toxic Waste

"Are you Ed Ertley?" Stottlemeyer asked a graying-haired man standing near the entrance to the Howard Nuclear Power Plant.

"That's me," the man said, shaking his hand, "I'm the general manager here."

"Captain Leland Stottlemeyer, homicide, this is Lieu—"

A heavy breathing noise interrupted him. Both of them turned to see a huge figure in a radiation suit stumbling very slowly toward them, all the while breathing so heavily that he could pass as Darth Vader's brother. "Allow me to introduce Detective Adrian Monk," Stottlemeyer said, rolling his eyes.

"How many radiation suits is he wearing?" Ertley asked incredulously.

"Four," Stottlemeyer told him, "He wanted to be sure he wouldn't get radiated by your toxic waste."

"Well, that explains why it took you an hour and a half to get here when it should have taken only thirty minutes," Ertley reasoned, "So, what is the purpose of your visit?"

"Mr. Ertley, a little girl was poisoned last night," Disher informed him, "Lab tests showed that a byproduct of nuclear waste was in the concoction that killed her. Since your plant is the only one within a hundred miles of the city, we suspect it came from here."

"Well this is news to me," Ertley said, "This plant is one of the most heavily guarded buildings in the San Francisco/San Jose metro area. I don't see how any of my waste could been taking out without us knowing."

"We'd like permission to examine your stock of waste," Stottlemeyer told him, "Just to verify how secure this building really is."

"Okay, I can make arrangements; Don," Ertley called over to the guard at a nearby checkpoint, "Get clearances and radiation suits for these people."

"Right away Mr. Ertley," the guard pulled out his radio and said something that couldn't be made out. Ertley continued to stare at Adrian. "Are you wearing TWO gas masks there?" he asked.

"I like to keep one for, you know, as a backup," Adrian said, his voice heavily muffled by both masks.

"How do you breathe?"

I brought my own air," Adrian gestured toward his back, where the protruding humps of four oxygen tanks could be seen.

Ertley shook his head and led them into the plant. Adrian waddled along very slowly, encumbered by all his protective layering. Apparently two gas masks didn't help his vision, as he walked right into a support column and tumbled to the ground. Both Natalie and Sharona lifted him to his feet. "Think you put enough on, Adrian?" the latter asked him sarcastically.

"Not really," the detective said, "I should really have put on another three suits."

"Hey, don't fall behind," Disher ran back to them. "Think you'll need another long shower, Monk?" he half-joked, "It must be really hot in there."

"I'm fine, I'm fine," Adrian told him. He hailed down a passing technician and straightened the man's nametag. Then his attention was diverted to a control panel to his left that had every switch except one set in the up position. He trudged over and flicked the sole switch pointing down up. "Don't!" shouted a woman nearby, rushing for the panel and flicking the switch back, "If you touch that the works'll blow here!"

"But it's—sticking out!" Adrian protested.

"Are you causing trouble again, Angela?" Ertley came skipping back looking upset.

"He was messing with the switches!" the woman said.

"Everything's always complaints, complaints, complaints!" Ertley sounded fed up, "I'm telling you, you rile up more trouble and I won't hesitate to…!"

"Is there a problem here?" Stottlemeyer inquired.

"Yes, we're underpaid for one!" the woman griped, "Take a look," she pointed to the O Henry bar in Ertley's hands, "He eats at least five of those every day, with money that could be spent improving deplorable working conditions and….!"

"Shall we press on?" Ertley led everyone else away. "My apologies," he told them, "She's the shop steward here, and she's been railing on me to improve her so-called bad conditions. The fact is everyone's here's paid more than twice the average of your average worker in the nuclear industry."

He took a bite out of the O Henry bar. "I like those too," Disher told him.

"They're the best bars on the market," Ertley smiled, "It may be an addiction, but chocolate addiction's one I like."

"Same here," Disher rubbed his stomach.

"Yeah, you can see it in your swell physique," Sharona told him.

"And it's good to have you back too," Disher responded, "I guess the time away was just too much."

"I didn't come back for you," the nurse snorted. Then she grew a bit more sympathetic. "Although, I did appreciate you checking the wound after Trevor shot me in Chicago."

"Well, that's what I'm here for," Disher flexed his muscles.

"Keep dreaming," she told him, walking away. "Guess she told you," Natalie couldn't help adding to a now puzzled Disher.

They'd reach the room with the radiation suits. Adrian waited outside while his associates changed into their own suits. People who walked by stared at him while he breathed heavily into his oxygen tanks. Finally everyone was ready. "Jerry," Ertley called to a balding man in a lab coat, "Get your meter. We need to check the barrels."

"Right away Mr. Ertley," Jerry slipped into the room and came out with his own suit and a Geiger counter. They all walked down several halls and through an airlock into an area labeled AUHTORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. "We keep all the waste in here," Jerry the scientist said, pressing a code to open a door into a lead room filled with yellow barrels, "Only the people who are supposed to are…that's strange."

"What?" Ertley glanced over his shoulder at the Geiger counter.

"There doesn't seem to be as high a reading as I'd expect," Jerry pointed it at the nearest barrel, "We're surrounded by waste, it should be spiking."

He walked closer to the barrel and put the counter right against it. It didn't make a sound. He broke the barrel's seal and looked inside. Then he tipped it over. Ordinary water spilled out onto the floor. "This isn't good at all," he gulped.

"Go alert everyone," Ertley ordered him, "I want this whole stock checked!"

* * *

An hour later, a check of the entire room revealed that thirteen whole barrels had been emptied of their toxic waste—almost ten percent of the whole stock. Ertley shook his head in dismay as the barrels were removed one by one for further analysis. "I don't see how this could have happened," he confided in Stottlemeyer, "This is top security."

"Who has access to this room?" Adrian asked, helping a technician stack several of the barrels onto a crane.

"Pretty much anybody who works with the waste division here, and that's about half the employees here," the general manager told him, "We have card keys to get into this section exclusively for this plant."

"I don't know how they could have gotten it out," Don the guard shook his head, "We tag each and every barrel with this monitoring device," he held up one in question, "Once it goes on it can't come off. We would have known if anyone took it out."

"What about room security?" Disher inquired.

"We cross it with so many alarm beams that a mouse couldn't get through without setting it off," Don told him, "Plus, the floor's heat-sensitive. If anyone steps on it when it's armed, the temperature drops to twenty-five below in three seconds."

"Sounds pretty well-done to me," Stottlemeyer reasoned, "What do you think Monk?" he asked the detective, only to find him caught up in the thrill of stacking the barrels absolutely straight on top of each other. "Oh never mind," he grumbled.

"Say what's this?" Natalie had noticed something inside one of the empty barrels being carried out by a technician, "That looks like a scratch of some kind."

Adrian snapped out of his funk and trotted over to observe. "You're right," he mused between deep breaths, "It looks like something lead scratched against the metal here. They didn't take the barrels out and replace them; they took the waste out vial by vial."

"So you're saying it's been stolen slowly?" Ertley looked worried at thought of a continuous theft of his nuclear byproducts.

"Probably," Adrian stared intently at the scratch, "Who was the last person you know came in here?"

"Hey Mr. Ertley, what's going on here?" came a new, familiar voice from the doorway. Adrian spun around. "Manny?" he exclaimed at the sight of the Santa Claus nut in a radiation suit of his own.

"Adrian?" the man recognized him as well.

"I didn't know you worked here?" the detective said. He'd expected to never see him again.

"Manny was here for about three years before we put him on administrative leave so he could work out his problems," Ertley explained, "I swear, the people they give me some of the time…"

He shook his head and walked out. "Say, are you ready for the big 2-4?" Manny asked his former asylum-mate, his eyes wide with excitement at the thought of the man in red coming to town.

"As ready as I'll ever be, Manny," Adrian said as patiently as he could.

"I asked Santa for a yo-yo this year," Manny put his arm around him, "A nice striped one. I'm going to wait on the roof of the plant and shoot up flares when he drops by. What did you ask for?"

"Uh, nothing much really. He never really got me much when I was younger," Adrian admitted, "When were you last in here?"

Last night," Manny told him.

"Did everything seem to be in order?"

"As far as I could see. Is something wrong?"

"Oh, nothing much, except some of your nuclear waste here was used to poison a twelve-year-old girl, but that's hardly worth mentioning," Adrian said, "You're absolutely sure you didn't notice any barrels missing?"

"No, but whoever did take them, I hope Santa gives them a whole coal mine when he comes," Manny said, "You know, nuclear power's more efficient than coal. I guess that why Santa chooses to give it to bad kids. I know a…"

"OK, thank you for your assistance sir, we'll call you if we need you," Stottlemeyer cut him off, "Everybody, I think our work here is done for the moment; let's go down to decontamination and get these suits off; I for one am roasting."

* * *

"You knew that guy?" Natalie raised an eyebrow at Adrian after they'd left decontamination and were waiting outside by their car.

"For a few days," her boss said, "Nice guy, for a delusional type." It had taken him twenty minutes to take off all the suits he'd been wearing, but he'd retained his spare gas mask and oxygen tanks just in case—of what he didn't know yet.

"Lieutenant, call the state health department and tell them what we've found here," Stottlemeyer ordered his associate as Natalie's cell phone rang and she walked off to answer it, "This is a serious situation."

"And the worst part of it is, Captain, they didn't use all of it to kill Clarissa last night," Adrian told him, "I'm guessing there's still about ten gallons of toxic waste out there, being used for lord knows what."

"Yeah," a pale look crossed Stottlemeyer's face, "That's what worries me, Monk."

"And the problem is, there's no way of knowing who took it," Sharona interceded, "Like the guy said, it could have been anyone in there. My question is, if they were taking it out in vials, how'd they do it without getting noticed?"

"What we're dealing with here is someone very crafty," Adrian said, "Someone who knew all the ins and outs of the security of that room. Someone who…"

"Mr. Monk," Natalie ran back over looking upset, "Mr. Monk, that was the sheriff over in Tewkesbury. Your brother's house just exploded."

"What?" Adrian's jaw dropped, "How…is he…?"

"He's all right, by some miracle," Natalie told him, "They want us to come over."

"Uh, you don't mind?" Adrian asked his former boss.

"Not at all, Monk," Stottlemeyer made a waving gesture. He'd never really warmed up to Ambrose.

"You sure you don't want to…?"

"No, I've taken enough trips into the heart of Monkland for one lifetime," the captain said, folding his hands across his chest."

"Let me come," Sharona climbed into the front passenger seat of Natalie's car, "He might need medical assistance. What, do they think it was an accident?"

"Not really," Natalie shook her head grimly, "They suspect foul play."

"Very interesting," Adrian commented. He was as puzzled as the women as to who would want to blow up the house. After all, Ambrose certainly never bothered anyone—Adrian himself excluded. Unless there'd been something Ambrose had never told him…


	4. Ambrose Bombed

"Oh boy, oh my," Adrian grimaced as they pulled onto his old street. His once pristine house was now a smoldering ruin. Fire trucks were parked all over the street, with several firefighters still trying to put out scattered flames. The detective rushed from the car once it came to a complete stop. "I'm Adrian Monk," he introduced himself to the sheriff, "Is my brother OK?"

"Right here, Adrian," Ambrose Monk stumbled over. He had a slight burn on his forehead, but looked remarkably unhurt otherwise. "Hello Natalie, Sharona," he greeted the women as they joined his brother, looking a little surprised to see the latter again.

Sharona put her hand to Ambrose's head. "How did you get off so well?" she asked, also amazed he'd survived the blast in one piece.

"I was in the attic when it happened," Ambrose explained, "One minute I'm searching through some of my old newspapers, and the next thing I know, I'm flying like a kite. Fortunately I landed in the tree across the street."

"He was really lucky," added a nearby medic, "He strained some muscles, but that was about it."

"I see," Adrian strolled over to the side of the house and smashed the only window that hadn't been broken by the blast, "What happened? Did you see who did it?"

"Well, about an hour and a half ago, I was busy finished typing out the instruction manual to the Ronco mixer," Ambrose told him, "And the doorbell rings. I look out and there's this guy in a gas company suit who tells me he's here to inspect the works. I was a little suspicious at first, since the gas was just done a month ago, but I figured, sure, why not, better safe than sorry, so I let him go into the basement. As you can see, big mistake."

"We called the gas company," the sheriff said, "They never sent anyone here. This house wasn't to be checked again for another month."

"Did you get a good look at him?" Natalie asked Ambrose.

"A sixty percent look, but he was wearing dark glasses and his hat was pulled down low," Ambrose said, "Plus, I didn't recognize his voice."

"He gave us a preliminary sketch," the sheriff waved to a deputy, who held up a piece of paper with a drawing of the perpetrator. Adrian squinted at it. "He looks sort of familiar, but I can't quite place him," he said.

He planted the bomb in the basement behind the chemical toilet," the sheriff said, "Come with me and take a look."

"I'll stay here and look after him," Sharona put her arm around Ambrose, which made the shut-in man crack a smile, "You two check it out."

"OK," Adrian had never been comfortable going into the claustrophobic confines of his basement, but he had to know what had happened. He and Natalie followed the sheriff into the basement, which was in utter disarray from the blast. "He put it right over here," the sheriff pointed to the bomb's location behind several shattered pipes, "Several pounds of C4 packed into the back here, arranged…"

Adrian darted over to the blast point, a wave of familiarity coming over his face. He made several hand gestures, waving them up in the air like lines generating from the bomb. "Excuse me, could this have been detonated by a cell phone?" he asked the sheriff.

"Well, it does look like it was detonated away from this basement," the sheriff mused, "Yeah, I guess it could have been a cell phone blast. Why?"

"Oh, just curious," Adrian said. He was wincing from claustrophobia. "Come on Natalie, I think we've seen…walls, closing in…."

"Let's go," Natalie took his arm and led him outside into the sunlight. What was that about?" she asked him.

"This bomb, it's basically the same kind that was used to kill Trudy," Adrian said, a strange look on his face, "Maybe I'm getting close to something here on this case, and they're coming after Ambrose now."

"Well Mr. Monk, I'm sure there are several crooks out there who build bombs like this," Natalie wasn't quite as convinced, "This might just be something that…"

She abruptly stopped as something up the street caught her attention. She stared intently for a minute at a figure that was standing on the far corner. Then suddenly took off running toward it. Adrian jogged hard to keep up with her. "What?" he asked her when he did, "What is it?"

"I could swear I just saw Mitch right now," Natalie was looking blank.

"Mitch? Here?" it was her boss's turn to be unconvinced.

"He was standing right there staring at me," Natalie pointed at the spot, which was empty now, "It looked just like him."

"Hmm," Adrian thought over the possibility. All likelihood from what he'd been told was that there was practically no chance for Mitch to have been able to make it to San Francisco…but then again, nothing was ever impossible. Could it have been him?

"Well, maybe he'll call later,' he suggested as the two of them walked back to what was once Ambrose's house. He stopped by the tree out front and started tearing leaves off the lowermost branch. "What are you doing now, Adrian?" Sharona joined them.

"The leaves, there's more on the left side of the branch than the right, I'm evening them out," Adrian said, trying to make sure the leaves were directly lined up across from each other. Sharona snatched the branch away from him. "Please, just leave the leaves alone!" she told him.

"So he's OK then?" Adrian glanced at Ambrose seated in the front doorway.

"Miraculously," Sharona told him, "You got anything?"

Adrian explained his observations to her. "I'd better go check on him," he said, walking over toward his brother. "So, where are you going to stay now?" he asked him, not willing to actually sit with him on the dirty steps.

"Here, where else?" Ambrose gestured around at his house.

"Ambrose, this place is trashed," Adrian pointed out, "Surely you could find a motel somewhere."

"Uh, no, I'm fine here," Ambrose was unswayed, "Besides, Dad's bound to hear about this, and when he does, he'll come by to check on…"

Adrian rolled his eyes. "I highly doubt that," he told his brother.

"Oh really Mr. Smarty?" Ambrose was defiant, "Well, he DID stop by on Halloween; that wasn't a dire emergency, so since this is, he'll show, you'll see!"

"I've got an idea," Adrian proposed. It was one he had a feeling he'd hate himself for in the morning, but it was worth it. "Why don't you come stay with us?"

"Well, your place isn't this house and…" Ambrose protested.

"Come on, it's Christmas, and, well, we've been apart for a long time," Adrian pressed. Ambrose shrugged and said, "OK, but I've got to come back here and check on this house at regular intervals."

Whatever," Adrian shrugged, "Why don't we get your things that haven't been destroyed and take them home—well, first let's go out somewhere, I think you need some more clothes."

* * *

"Adrian, does the word credit limit mean anything to you?" Sharona was griping as they entered the detective's apartment a couple of hours later.

"He's my brother, and it's Christmas," Adrian said in self-defense. He took the bags she and Natalie had been carrying and started laying out each of the forty identical shirts, pants, and vests he'd brought for Ambrose on the couch in perfect order.

"My credit card can't suppose this many goods!" the nurse kept protesting, "Do you have any idea how far in debt this leaves me?"

"I'll pay you back, Sharona."

"Oh, that'll happen. Since when have you ever given me ANY money, Adrian?"

Adrian paid no attention. "Come on in, Ambrose," he waved to his brother, who hesitantly walked in carrying the few possessions he'd managed to bring from his house: his typewriter, several files, a 3-D chess game, several encyclopedias, and a few pictures of their father. "Nice, very nice," the instruction manual writer said, glancing around his brother's apartment, "This must cost a lot."

"Oh it a liv—don't touch the table!" Adrian flew across the room and stopped Ambrose before he could straighten out the crooked coffee table. "Do NOT, under any circumstances, move this table!" he told him.

"Why? Everything else…oh yeah, Trudy," Ambrose flushed with realization as to his brother's habits with his wife.

"Why don't we get you set up in here?" Natalie led Ambrose into the den. As she passed it, she hit the play button on the answering machine. The first message brought everyone to a halt: "Adrian, it's me, Ambrose," said a rather weak imitation of Ambrose's voice, "Something's come up; can you come here to Tewksbury right away?"

Everyone stared at the machine. "I sure didn't leave that message," Ambrose said, looked shocked.

"The bomb," Adrian was shocked himself, "It was meant for me. They were trying to lure me in."

"They must be really desperate to keep you off the case," Sharona figured, "But who at the plant would have the time to set up the blast that soon after we found the missing waste?"

"Maybe the suspect isn't at the plant," Natalie theorized, "Maybe it's someone else who doesn't like us."

"What are you suggesting? Eric and Rochelle did it?" Adrian asked her. Although neither of Clarissa's parents had liked him, he never thought of them as willing to stoop to kill him.

"Well Mr. Monk, you said no possibility's impossible," Natalie pointed out, "And they had the opportunity."

"I suppose we could ask; they won't be too happy though, I can guarantee you that," Adrian said.

"I'll just make myself comfortable then, I guess?" Ambrose inquired.

"Before you do, Ambrose, just a few simple rules," Adrian told him, "First, make sure you keep everything in this apartment in straight lines and right angles at all times. Second, clean every dish you eat off of immediately. Third, try not to use the bathroom unless it's an absolute emergency. Keep those in mind and you'll be fine."

"Sure, if you say so," Ambrose plopped down on the couch and turned on CNN. Adrian waved at him to sit in the exact center of the sofa, and then fluffed up the pillow Ambrose had sat on and laid it exactly opposite from the pillow on the right side of the couch. "Enjoy," he told his brother before he left with the women.


	5. Leads and Memories

"What are you suggesting, Natalie? That we'd kill our own daughter?" Rochelle Hart shouted at her.

"I told you it would come to this," Adrian commented from the mantle, where he couldn't stop himself from rearranging the Hart's family pictures.

"Well I know you've been fighting a bit lately," Natalie went on, "I overheard Clarissa tell Julie a couple of times she wasn't happy living here sometimes."

"It looks like someone threw something here, perhaps a soda bottle," Adrian pointed to a dark spot on the wall, which he promptly began scrubbing down with a wipe.

Eric sighed. "Yes, Rochelle and I have been going through a few rough spots," he conceded, "But we're intent on working them out. And I repeat what my wife said: we would NEVER hurt Clarissa!"

"Where were you this afternoon?" Sharona spoke up, gently pulling Adrian away from the soda stain.

"Right here, mourning," Rochelle said.

"I see," Natalie examined a tear-soaked picture of Clarissa on the coffee table, "Yeah, I can buy that."

"And if you're going to accuse us of blowing up Monk's brother's house, let me remind all of you that neither of us knows a thing about explosives," Eric reiterated, "Which reminds me, you haven't been working against my wishes, have you Monk?"

He gave the detective a harsh look. "Uh, of course not," Adrian lied, "We're simply following up on…do you know your Christmas tree's crooked here?"

"Leave it!" Eric snapped, but Adrian was already bent over and fiddling with the tree's metallic trunk.

"What've you got against him?" Sharona demanded, "We're all just trying to help, especially him!"

"Mrs. Fleming, if you had to spend twelve years having to spend class with him, watching him rearrange everything, cleaning off your desks, and straightening your clothes for you when you don't ask for it, you'd be fed up with him too," Rochelle told her.

"Well that is a good point," Sharona admitted, "He'd drive me crazy in an hour, so twelve years must be like…"

There was a loud snapping noise from the corner. Everyone turned around to see Adrian holding the entire tree aloft; it had broken off at the base. "Well, I think our work here is done," the detective said quickly, "I think you can fix this, Eric," he said, handing his former classmate the broken tree. Fire burned heavy in Eric's eyes as he watched them leave.

"Nice Adrian, very nice," Sharona grumbled to him as they walked toward Natalie's car.

"It could have fallen over if I didn't deal with it," Adrian said, "At any rate, they're in the clear."

"How do we know that?" the nurse asked.

"Natalie brought up points that cleared them," Adrian gestured to his current assistant, "We'd better tell the captain."

* * *

"So it's not them, huh Monk?" Stottlemeyer asked him about an hour later.

"No, Captain, they're kosher," Adrian told him, straightening out the Santa hat Stottlemeyer had put on top of the stuffed duck on his windowsill, "Something tells me there's something else at play here that we haven't taken into account yet."

"Captain," Disher ran into the office, "I've got some big news."

He paused for the longest time. "And don't you think I should know about it, Randy?" Stottlemeyer asked, irritated.

"We got the catering company," Disher told him, "That punch was sent to the school by accident."

"It what?" the captain's expression dropped.

"It was supposed to go to the SUMTER Conference Room at the Best Western in Oakland," Disher said dismally, "They must have misread it and sent it to SUTTER Middle School by mistake."

There was an abrupt silence in the room. "Who was at the Sumter Conference last night?" Stottlemeyer inquired.

"It was…" Disher pulled out a piece of paper, "…a convention of police chiefs from all over northern California."

"Very interesting," Adrian inquired, touching the decorative garland around the window, "You send a bowl of poisoned punch to a police convention. If all of them die, nobody's going to think about which one was the intended target."

"So they were only after one guy then, Monk?"

"Basically, Captain, one of those chiefs was probably onto whoever our guilty party is, and they tried to bump him off, knowing that there'd probably be enough dead bodies in that conference room for us not to think it was a targeted killing…who strung this garland," the detective picked at the strand surrounding the window. Stottlemeyer tried his best not to groan. "So any idea who at the plant is the guilty party, Monk?" he asked.

"None of them really stand out yet; I'll have to get more info on then," Adrian told him.

"Well we've done some looking ourselves, and my money's on our lab boy Jerry Malcolm," the captain said, "It seems he got a month-long suspension about a year ago for taking important stuff home he wasn't supposed to. Reports are he's trying to prove something to his bosses; taking nuclear waste seems right up that alley."

"But why would he poison the police?" Adrian pointed out, "I'd go after his bosses if there's friction there."

He glanced at his watch. "And I can't stay any longer," he informed his former boss, "I told Ambrose to put dinner in; it'll be ready by now."

"I can tell you're going to love having him over for the holidays," Stottlemeyer said with an ill-hidden smirk.

"I'm not sure yet," Adrian conceded, "Like everything else in my life, having him there is a blessing…and a curse. Lovely, isn't it?"

* * *

"Hello honey, I'm home," Adrian said half-jokingly as he reentered the apartment following his ride back.

"Welcome back, Adrian," Ambrose said from the sofa, where he was busy at his typewriter, "Any luck."

"On your house or the case?"

"Either or both."

"We now think the killer wanted to assassinate a police chief," Adrian explained, pulling out a can of disinfectant and randomly spraying surfaces around the living room, "As for your house, we're still working on it. How've you been doing?"

"Oh just fine," Ambrose told him, "I finished the manual for the All-Start Car Battery about thirty minutes ago. Now I'm onto the Silver Blade Slicer; this'll take a little longer."

"Slicers and dicers are that complicated, huh?" Adrian gave the coffee table a healthy dosing down. "What, you still don't trust me?" Ambrose protested, "I haven't spread any germs, honest!"

"It's not that I don't trust you, Ambrose, it's just…I don't trust you," Adrian wiped the table clean, then entered the kitchen and begun scrubbing down the sink with liquid cleaner.

"Oh and by the way, this was in one of the papers I managed to save," Ambrose pulled it out of its file and brought it over to his brother, "You said the union chief at the nuclear plant was an Angela Moreno? Well two of her former workers swore under oath last year that she ordered them to disable company trucks in order to get more leverage during their last bargaining agreement. They could never quite pin it down on her, but that's the story. It's not enough to convict, I know, but I hope it helps."

"Oh it helps, Ambrose, that it does," Adrian told him, "I don't think it's her, though. Something tells me I should look elsewhere. I might want to call it in to the captain, though."

"I'd rather you leave the line open," Ambrose suggested, "I know Dad's going to call any moment now."

"Oh really, Ambrose?" Adrian raised his eyebrows.

"Trust me, he'll call!" Ambrose said sharply, "When he was still with us, he always called, didn't he?"

"Well, true but…"

"Just you wait and see, mister, he'll show you wrong this time!" Ambrose said, "And he WILL call; he never just popped up unannounced."

For a moment the two of them stared at each other. Then Ambrose decided to change the subject. "So, are you going to put up any decorations?" he asked, gazing around the essentially barren and unadorned apartment.

"Well, I thought about thinking about putting them up," his brother said, pulling out his vacuum and starting it up, "But you know me and decorations; they'd have to be absolutely perfect…could you not stand there, Ambrose? The lines on this carpet are all diagonal."

Ambrose complied, plopping back on the couch. "Not to sound like I'm intruding, but you want to be normal, right?" he asked.

"I try, believe me, I try," Adrian said, his eyes concentrating on the rug.

"Trust me on this, you'll look more normal if you put them up," Ambrose said, "And if you're not up to it, I can assist you." He looked right at his brother and said, "By the way, what is it about today's explosion that you're not going to tell me about?"

Adrian shut off the vacuum. "What am I not telling you?" he asked, poorly feigning ignorance.

"When you told me in the car about the details of the bomb, you had that look on your face that you have when you're keeping something," Ambrose told him, "So as your brother, I'd like to know, what is it about that bomb that's so important?"

Adrian sighed. Since Ambrose had considered himself responsible for Trudy's death for so many years, he hadn't wanted to introduce a situation where his brother might start feeling guilty again. But Ambrose's iron stare was too much for him to bear. "That bomb was similar to the one that killed Trudy," he admitted, "Now please don't think it's you again, Ambrose, because it's not—at least I hope not—but I'm sure whether it's a coincidence or not."

He couldn't quite register what Ambrose was thinking in response to this, as his expression was completely neutral. Ambrose strolled ever so slowly over to the window and glanced out into the setting sun. "Well then," he said slowly, "There's only one thing I have to say to that: if it is them, Adrian, I want you to nail them good. Take them down as hard as you can ethically. They stole from me too when they took Trudy away from us."

"I know," Adrian joined him at the window, "They stole her from a lot of people."

He sighed. "You know, for a little while there, Trudy actually made me able to enjoy Christmas," he admitted, "When I was with her, I didn't mind it if the lights were crooked or the tinsel was out of control. Now it's worse than ever, and that's why I don't decorate."

"Yeah, and you never really liked Christmas that much before you met her either," Ambrose reminisced, "You weren't really Scrooge, but you weren't Crachit either. I remember the one time it actually did snow, and all the kids in the neighborhood were building that snowman out front, and you stood at the window and watched them all day, looking like you really wanted to…"

"Well, I think the pork chops are almost ready," Adrian said quickly, not willing to dive too deeply into unpleasant memories, "I'll go get it ready for us, and then I'll clean it off afterwards, so you don't have to worry about it.

He hurried off into the kitchen and took it out of the oven. He conceded Ambrose's point; Christmas was not one of his favorite holidays, for a number of unpleasant reasons.


	6. Funeral Follies

Adrian had never been comfortable at funerals. His life was usually miserable enough without them. As such, the two he had attended—his mother's and Trudy's—had been almost unbearable, especially the latter. He'd spent the duration of that one staring blankly at the ground and wishing there was some way he could trade places with his wife in the coffin.

Thus, as he stood in the middle of the cemetery as a brisk rain fell, along with almost fifty Sutter Middle Schoolers who come to bid Clarissa farewell, he sincerely wished he could be anywhere else at the moment—including a dump. Not that this was his only concern; the rain had been falling steadily all day, and mud seemed to be springing up everywhere. He glanced uneasily at his pant legs, checking their cleanliness.

"Tell me," he asked Sharona next to him, "You don't see any mud here, do you?"

"No," she said without looking at him.

"You're just trying to keep me from panicking; I just know it's here," he said, fidgeting wildly.

"Mr. Monk, please!" Natalie took his arm, "You're not helping."

She pointed to her daughter near the front of the crowd watching the priest give the final eulogy with the most somber of expressions. "Funerals aren't the places to worry about mud."

"Well I wish that Mother Nature would call me in advance if she plans to bring up one of these," Adrian pointed at the rain pouring down form the sky, "If I had my way, we'd…"

His gaze abruptly caught a familiarly figure standing on the other side of the cemetery, watching the burial proceedings. "What would Jerry Malcolm be doing here?" he wondered, pointing to the lab technician, who perked up once he realized he'd been spotted and started walking briskly away. Adrian weaved his way through the crowd, being careful to stay on the mud-free areas. "Mr. Malcolm," he called loudly, interrupting the priest, "Mr. Malcolm, I'd like a word with you."

The technician took off running to his car. Adrian hustled as best he could, but his adversary had too much of a head start on him. He was in his car and off before the detective could reach him.

"Now he was rather jumpy," Natalie commented once she'd joined him.

"I know," Adrian watched the car disappear around the corner, "I must admit, I haven't been thinking that…"

But then he noticed Natalie wasn't paying attention again. He followed her gaze to see a figure standing about ten rows away looking at them. Although he couldn't be made out clearly—especially with the rain as hard as it was—Adrian recognized him as the figure they'd seen near Ambrose's yesterday. It couldn't be…

"Mitch?" his assistant called toward the figure. She broke into a run toward him, prompting him to take off running himself. "Mitch, is that you?" she shouted after him, "It's me, there's no need to run!"

"You can say that again!" Adrian huffed, clutching a stitch in his chest. Despite his tenure as a member of the track team in high school, he was now badly out of shape. When they reached the spot they'd last seen the figure, however, he was nowhere to be found. "We could he have gone?" Natalie asked desperately scanning the trees in every direction, "He couldn't have vanished that fast."

Adrian didn't answer. Several thoughts were roaming through his mind. He was trying to remember one of the pictures of Mitch he'd most recently seen. Once he had, he mentally placed it over the image of the phantom figure. As far as he could tell, it was a pretty close match. But not enough to completely convince him. And it definitely hadn't been Mitch's ghost; he'd had enough encounters with Trudy's spirit to know a ghost's exact composition.

"I don't understand why he'd run," Natalie continued to point out as they walked back toward the rest of the funeral party, "We had no quarrels. Why doesn't he come to me?"

"Well, Natalie, not to burst the bubble, but what if it isn't him?" Adrian told her, "After Trudy died, I saw her everywhere before I crawled into a shell for three years."

"Mr. Monk, we dated for almost three years; there's no way on Earth I could mistake him," Natalie said emphatically, "That was definitely him, there's no mistake. If only I could figure out…"

"Excuse me you two!" snapped the priest to their right, "I am trying to conduct a funeral here! If you'd be so kind, perhaps you'd like to be quiet so I could have everyone's UNDIVIDED attention!"

"We're discussing something here that deals with the undead," Adrian told him.

"Well perhaps the undead should take a backseat here to the…!" the priest started to say, but at that moment he abruptly sneezed. Adrian let out a loud shriek and jumped backwards away from him…right into the coffin. Both he and it abruptly tumbled into the grave. The funeral guests rushed to the lip of the opening, but all jumped back as an unearthly cry rose up from below. "EEEEEAAAAAAAIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIICCCCCCCCKKKKKKK!" the detective was screeching, "Oh my GOD! Oh my GOD!" It's everywhere! Mud, mud, mud! AAAAAAAAAAAIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE! Stop staring at me, Clarissa! Somebody get me out of here! SHAAARROOOOOOOOOOOOOOONNNNNAAAAAAAAAAAA!"

The nurse sighed in resignation. "Why am I always the one who has to go down into the dirty areas for him?" she confided in a bystander as she rolled up her pant legs and strode toward the grave.

* * *

"Clean enough yet, Mr. Monk?" Natalie called in through her bathroom door. Her boss had been usurping her bathroom for almost three and a half hours now.

"Almost," came his response, "I still need to clean down the tub."

"Leave it!" Sharona called in, still covered with mud herself, "I still need a shower of my own! I can't believe you slipped that many times!"

"It was a steep grave, and it was wet," Adrian protested as he finally emerged fully reclothed from the bathroom. Sharona brushed by him and practically dove into the tub. "I wonder what her problem is?" the detective wondered.

"Well, at least you did make today at least a little bearable, Mr. Monk," Julie told him from the living room floor where she and Benjy were playing Mrs. Pac-Man on the TV.

"Oh, well, good to know I helped ease the pain of never seeing your friend again," Adrian said. Immediately he regretted saying it, as it made the girl break down again. Natalie shot him a very ugly look. "It's all right, honey, it's all right," she bent down and embraced her daughter, "He didn't really mean it. If there's anything you want today you can have it."

"How about the movies?" Benjy suggested, "There's one at the Cinemark we'd both like to see."

"If that's what you want, that's what we'll do," Natalie stroked Julie's hair reassuringly.

"And leave him here alone?" Sharona had been listening in on the conversation from the bathroom, "Do you want your house to be completely rearranged?"

"Hey, I'll go too," Adrian proposed.

"Now think this over Adrian; would you really last for ten minutes inside a movie theater, especially if the film's a hit?"

"Hey, I've gone to the movies lately, Sharona."

"Oh yeah?" Sharona was skeptical, "What did you see?"

"Oh, it was the one with the…guy being chased by the…bad guys in their tanks and jets and…battleships, and he dumped gas all over the ground and threw a match on it when they drove over it, and they all blew up really…big. You see it?"

"No, I think I missed that one," she said, sounding utterly confused.

The doorbell abruptly rang. "It's us, we've got something," came Stottlemeyer's voice form the other side. Natalie unlocked it and let them in. "What've you got, Captain, Lieutenant?" she asked them.

"For once, we've lucked out," Stottlemeyer said, shaking off the rain from his umbrella into the nearest garbage can, which nonetheless made Adrian cringe, "It would have taken us at least five days to interview all those police chiefs at the convention, but one of them just keeled over dead last night, and he's right across the bay in Oakland. And this one's right up our alley; it's a really strange death. We have to get going now if we want to beat rush hour traffic."

"Wait, we can't go now, I just promised I'd take Julie to the movies," Natalie protested, placing her arm around her daughter.

"I'll take them," Sharona called from the bathroom, "You go with him; you'd be doing me a huge favor, saving me the agony."

"That works out well, actually," Disher approached the bathroom door, "I think Natalie can help in a bizarre case like this."

The running of water in the bathroom abruptly stopped. "What are you saying?" Sharona demanded, "That I wasn't up to par with you and she is?"

"Uh, well, um, no, I'm just…are you really naked in there?" Disher made a half-hearted attempt to change the subject, which landed him a slap on the shoulder by his boss and a stern look. "As I was saying, boys and girls," Stottlemeyer continued, "Traffic's going to be heavy, so whoever's coming better come along now."

"Okay sweetheart, just stick with Mrs. Fleming, she'll take good care of you," Natalie kissed Julie goodbye, "Call me if you need anything. And Mr. Monk," she turned to the detective, "May I remind you that when we're out in the field, if you feel the need to make an insensitive comment, please, keep it to yourself."

"Trust me, I had no idea that was going to slip out, really," Adrian said as they left the house, "And I am sorry, believe me I am."

"Sure you are."

"Really I am, and I can deduct from your paycheck if you get sarcastic."

"We're partners, remember, you can't just deduct me off."

"Yes I can. Partnerships are the same thing as assistants."

"Then I can deduct your pay if I want, Mr. Monk."

"I don't think so."

"And why not?"

"Because I keep my pay safe where no one can touch it, and you don't."

"They're going to have loads of fun together today," Benjy remarked as the door closed behind the two adults.


	7. Santa Claus, Murderer?

The ride over to Oakland was quicker than Stottlemeyer had predicted; in fact, it only took them about twenty minutes. They soon found themselves in front of a tall, narrow blue house surrounded by police cruisers. "I'm Captain Leland Stottlemeyer," he introduced himself to a deputy, "We talked on the phone."

"Right this way then," the deputy waved them into the house, "I hope you can help us here, Captain, this one has us stumped. He was all right last night, and now he's flat dead."

"Was he poisoned?" Natalie inquired as they entered the living room to see the body of the police chief sprawled across an armchair.

"Maybe. Once the coroner gets a good look at him," the deputy said, shaking his head, "I don't see how, though. He keeps everything in this house locked at all times since this is a bad neighborhood."

"Did he ever mention any cases he was working on lately?" Stottlemeyer asked.

"To be honest, Captain, a couple of us overheard him on the phone saying he was working on something big and was close to a breakthrough of some kind, but he never said exactly what it was," the deputy admitted.

Adrian examined a glass lying on the floor. "Milk?" he inquired after he sniffed it.

"Chief Taylor had a sort of thing for it," the deputy explained, "According to the date on the bottle, he only bought it two nights ago."

"There's something in here that doesn't taste like milk," Adrian sniffed harder, "It smells exactly like the punch did at the dance." The detective looked at the table next to the chair. "It was here," he pointed to a circle of moisture in the middle of it, "Judging by the water concentration, it was sitting here all day. You're sure no one else entered this house all day yesterday?"

"Like I said, all the doors and windows in this place are locked tight at all times when he's not home," the deputy said, "We had to break in ourselves when we didn't hear from him all day. He's almost always punctual."

"Very interesting," Adrian walked around the room making several more hand gestures. "How'd they get the poison into the milk, then? There's clearly no signs of sawing on the floorboards, and…" he felt around the walls, then wiped his hands off once he was done, "No secret panels in the wall."

"Maybe he snuck inside and let himself out?" Natalie suggested, checking the stairs for a sign of a secret entrance.

"No," Adrian produced his tweezers and withdrew the chief's keys from the dead man's shirt pocket, "If he had, these would be with the murderer. There'd be no point in putting them back on the body in that case."

"I've got a theory," Disher spoke up, "But you'll have to promise not to laugh."

"Now why would I laugh?" Stottlemeyer told him, "Just say it."

"You promise?"

"I will not laugh, Randy."

"Death Eaters."

"Death Eaters?" Stottlemeyer, true to his word, did not laugh. Rather, he nearly had a stroke.

"A splinter cell of American Death Eaters," Disher said tentatively, "They Apparated in, blew him away, then Apparated back out."

"Oh sure, and I suppose we should ask the Wicked Witch of the West if any of her Winged Monkeys have been going around carrying poison at night!" the captain thundered, "That is the stupidest theory I ever heard, Lieutenant!"

"I was only joking, sir," Disher said quickly, "I wasn't really considering it, actually."

"What are you doing now, Monk?" Stottlemeyer asked his go-to guy, who was standing near Chief Taylor's Christmas tree. "The balls," Adrian explained, pointing to them, "I'm putting them in sequence: red, blue, yellow, green, red, blue, yellow, green. It makes sense."

"This is not your tree, Monk!" yelled the captain.

"Well, he's dead, I don't he'd mind," Adrian pointed to the dead chief.

"Excuse me," the deputy ran back in, "It looks like we may have a witness. He says he saw something strange going on last night here."

"Oh good, maybe we can now…Manny?" Adrian was surprised to once again see his asylum-mate being led in. Manny, on the other hand, seemed rather happy. "I saw him!" he gushed, "This time I really saw him!"

"Who's him?" Natalie asked.

"Santa," Manny said matter of factually, "He was here last night."

"He was?" Adrian had a feeling of déjà vu, "What did you see him doing?"

"Last night I was reading the newspaper across the street…" Manny began.

"You live right across the street?" Disher asked.

'Yeah, the company gave it to me; my old house was repossessed," Manny said, "Anyway, I heard a thumping sound. I ran to the window, and there he was, right on the roof."

"What was he doing?" Stottlemeyer inquired.

"He was sort of sitting by the chimney, bent over, like he was looking at something," Manny explained, "I figure he was checking his list to make sure Mr. Taylor deserved presents. Anyway, I ran over to get my camera, but by the time I got back he was gone. I searched in the alley, but there was no sign of him. I'm guessing he parked the sleigh around the back in mid-air so he could hop back in with having to land. I'll bet he's starting early so the big night won't be too much of a hassle for him this year."

"So you did approach Mr. Taylor's house?" the Captain asked him.

"Yeah, I did, so?"

"Mr. Taylor is dead," Stottlemeyer told him, "Your friend Mr. Claus…" he had to strain himself to avoid a snigger," …may have been responsible."

"Oh no, not Santa!" Manny gasped, "He'd never hurt a flea!" He grew thoughtful. "Unless it was his evil twin Stanley Claus."

"Hey," the deputy ran back over, "We just checked this guy's house. He's got some strange looking cylinders inside this safe behind a painting."

"With yellow radiation symbols?" the captain asked.

"Exactly. Mr. Nast," the deputy looked Manny in the eye, "Do you have an explanation as to why they got there?"

"I didn't bring any of my work home with me!" Manny said nervously, "I only keep my money inside that safe!"

"Well there's nothing but radiation inside that safe now," the deputy said, "Would you like to revise your story?"

"I told you everything!" Manny was desperate.

"Would you mind stepping this way?" the Oakland cops led him off. "Well, that was even easier than I thought," Stottlemeyer confessed.

"I don't think it was him, Captain," Adrian admitted slowly.

"When they've got concrete evidence against the guy? Monk, we caught him," his boss told him.

"He was right about Santa the last time, though," the detective said, "I don't think he'd make it up again. I need to take a closer look at things here."

He walked outside before Stottlemeyer could protest. The detective walked around to the side of the house. "So what are we looking for?" Natalie joined him.

"Anything that can show there was someone up there on the roof," Adrian looked up at it, "And I can see proof now."

"And that is…?"

Check out the lights around the edge of the roof; the bulbs in that strand there look like they've been crushed ," Adrian pointed. Without warning, he climbed up on Natalie's shoulders. 'Mr. Monk!" she protested, trying hard to maintain her balance.

"You'll thank me later," he called down, "Just try and hold steady. Wait, OK, I see, let me get that."

"Now what are you doing?" she demanded.

"His icicle lights, some of them are twisted around, I'm fixing them so they alternate, left side of the strand, right side of the…"

"Mr. Monk, do you see any other evidence or not!" she couldn't hide her distaste for the situation.

"OK, yeah, I can see some," Adrian looked up at the roof, "There's at least fifteen footprints up here, and it looks like something was set down by the chimney."

"Why can't you send me up there?" Natalie complained as her boss accidentally stepped on her nose.

"Because you've been walking around in the mud most of the day, and I'm, well, me," Adrian told her, "The chimney. That table the glass of milk was on was right next to the chimney."

"So what does that mean, the sent it doooooowwwww….!" Natalie could longer keep her balance. Both she and Adrian toppled backwards into the bushes. The detective quickly jumped up and brushed himself off like there was no tomorrow. "We'll need to check the other roofs," he said, taking hold of her arm and helping her up, "They're close enough so he could have jumped from rooftop to rooftop."

Natalie opened her mouth to protest against more roof searches, but then her gaze came across something shining against the house. "Now what's this?" she wondered out loud, walking over and picking it up, "Who would want a miniature bear trap?"

"Interesting," Adrian examined the small steel jaws carefully—without actually touching them. "It broke off from something; you can see the metal's jagged on the back here. The question is, what did it break off from?"

* * *

"Your guess is as good as mine, Adrian," Sharona told them back at the station afterwards, "I'm not a mechanic. I think you're right, though, he's being framed."

"What makes you so certain of that?" Natalie had to know.

'Because I've met his doctor before!" Sharona's response was less than cordial, "Manny Nast is completely harmless and innocent. I don't believe he'd steal nuclear waste for anything!"

"I want to believe him too, but then how come it got in his safe?" Natalie pointed out, "I looked afterwards; the safe was perfectly intact. No one cracked it open."

"Yeah, you're really quite the detective, aren't you?" the nurse grumbled.

"She really is," Adrian said, "She's starting to catch on really good; she found the evidence that…"

He abruptly stopped as he noticed that a dismal expression was crossing Sharona's face. He recognized it immediately: suppressed jealousy. "So, did Benjy and Julie like the movie?" he asked quickly to get off the dangerous subject.

"They did," Sharona's tone remained distant and hostile, "I dropped them off at Gail's and came down to see if I could be of some help, but I guess I won't be needed."

Stottlemeyer and Disher entered before things could get worse. "Well, if you're still bent on protecting your pal Manny Nast, Monk, we checked the vials for fingerprints, and his is the only ones on them," the captain told him.

"What about the footprints on the roof?" Adrian pointed out, fiddling with the flower on the wreath hung on the office door, "Somebody WAS up there, Captain."

"Look, Monk, he's delusional," was Stottlemeyer's rebuttal, "For all we know, he could have put on a Santa suit and climbed up there himself to act out his fantasies."

"He doesn't act out fantasies," Sharona interrupted curtly, "That's not what people with his specific diagnosis do. But I guess my word isn't gold."

There was a knock on the office door at that moment. Disher opened it a crack. "Yes?" he asked to someone outside the others couldn't see, as the office blinds were drawn, "Oh thanks. Captain, did you order some dynamite?" he asked, holding up a lit stick. He did a massive double take when he realized what he'd said. "Uh, I think it's for you, sir!" he cried, tossing the dynamite to the captain.

"Tell him thanks but no thanks!" Stottlemeyer yelped, tossing it back to Disher.

"Uh, you're the captain, you should sign off on it!" Disher threw it back to him.

"I'm not taking responsibility; Monk, you take it!" Stottlemeyer tossed it to the detective.

"Explosives aren't in my consultant contract; Natalie!" Adrian threw it to her.

"I don't want to…Sharona!" she threw it to the nurse.

"Don't give it to me, I'm not even part of this team anymore; Lieutenant!" Sharona hurled it at Disher.

"Captain!" Disher tossed it back to Stottlemeyer.

"Monk!"  
"Natalie!"  
"Sharona!"

"Lieutenant!"

"Captain!"

"Monk!"

"Natalie!"

"Sharona!"

"Lieutenant!"

"I've got an idea; Monk hold this!" Disher gave the detective the dynamite, then picked up Stottlemeyer's chair and started smacking the window with it. "No, not the window Randy!" Stottlemeyer yelled at him, to no avail.

"Hey what's going on in here?" Officer Joe Christie stuck his head in the door.

"BOMB!" everyone else yelled at him. Christie took the stick off Adrian and doused it in Stottlemeyer's coffee just as the fuse was starting to run out. This coincided with a loud crash as Disher broke the window open. The lieutenant, too caught up in the thrill of the moment to notice the danger was now past, grabbed the coffee cup and dynamite, threw them out the window, and dove to the floor with his hands over his ears. After a minute, he slowly rose up. "Is it over?" he asked.

"YES!" Stottlemeyer pulled his adjutant's hand off his ear and screamed into it, "It was over a LOOOOOOOONG time ago, Randy!"

Disher took a look out the window. "OOOOOOOhh," he said slowly and sheepishly, "I'll…I'll go tell the maintenance man he's got a new job."

He hurried out of the office. "Thanks Joe, nice heads-up," Stottlemeyer congratulated Christie.

"Anytime," Christie said, "I heard the shouting and had a feeling something was wrong."

"You didn't see anything, did you?" Sharona asked him.

"Well, I caught a glimpse of a guy dressed in a long gray coat and dark glasses walk up to the office door and knock," Christie admitted, "I thought he was some undercover guy."

"He's probably halfway to Fisherman's Wharf by now," Stottlemeyer grumbled, "Could you describe him to a sketch artist, Joe?"

"I could give it a try," Christie said.

"Good, good, let's do that," Stottlemeyer led him out of the office. "There's no way Manny could have orchestrated this," Adrian said out loud when they'd left, "He wasn't under suspicion until this afternoon; he wouldn't have had time to hire anyone."

"Then who is responsible?" Natalie looked like she had no idea.

"Like I said, I think there's something else at work here," Adrian looked out the shattered window at San Francisco, "Something too close for comfort."


	8. A Plant Full of Suspects

"Believe me, gentlemen, I'm as surprised as anyone that Manny Nast would do such a thing as steal our waste," Ertley told them the next afternoon, "He's always been a model employee during his time here."

"That's one of the reasons we think he's innocent," came Adrian's voice through the multiple gas masks he'd once again donned before entering the Howard nuclear plant. The general manager looked him over in amazement. "I guess one can never prepare too much to come to a place like this," he said, taking a bite out of yet another O Henry bar.

"It was a tough choice to come," Adrian admitted, "After all, I only have twenty oxygen tanks left."

"Well, I think you're simply trying to find more coins from the pot of gold, gents, I see no further reason to continue this…" Ertley started to say, but then Jerry ran in. "Uh, Mr. Ertley, bad news," he said breathlessly, "Someone's still taking the waste out."

"They're what?" Ertley's expression went south.

"We did another check just now; two more barrels have lost up to seventy percent of their waste over the last three days," Jerry told him.

"Oh boy, ooooh boy," Ertley ran off with his top technician. Adrian turned to Stottlemeyer. "Like I said, there's no way Manny could keep doing this when he's in custody," he said between deep oxygen breaths, "And taking into account how much waste has been stolen, and how it's being stolen, the thefts would have started when he was still in the asylum."

"OK, yeah, I think you're right, Monk," Stottlemeyer conceded, "He is innocent. But how come his prints are on the vials?"

"I'm still working on that," Adrian said, stacking files on Ertley's desk in a way that they were all perfectly lined up, "There's got to be some kind of rational explanation."

"Captain," Disher entered the office, "I got in touch with the state federal investigation office. Chief Richard Taylor was working in conjunction with the feds. It seems the governor's office received a threatening letter from Caucasian Provinces a few months ago."

"Caucasian Provinces? Those white supremacist creeps that attacked those buildings in Chicago?"

"One and the same," Disher said, "It seems they're threatening to launch a major attack somewhere here in the state unless all Mexican immigrants are expelled from the state immediately."

"Ouch," Adrian commented, pushing in some of the books on Ertley's shelves so they were as lined up as could be, "They're not having a merry Christmas, are they?"

"The disappearance of the waste here isn't all," Disher went on grimly, "A lab in San Diego had several containers of anthrax stolen in October, and Edwards Air Force Base reported the disappearance of a huge stockpile of explosives and arms. The worst part is, they still haven't got any leads as to who exactly these people are."

"So Chief Taylor did know?" Stottlemeyer inquired.

"The attorney general says he called at the beginning of the week to say he was almost certain he knew who the mastermind was, but he needed a few more days to get positive proof on the perpetrator."

"And the perp wasn't going to wait to be fingered, so he poisoned the punch to take him out, but the guy he trusted the job with sent it to the school by accident," Stottlemeyer reasoned, "After which he probably chewed the guy out and resolved to do it himself, which he did. Good, at least now we know who exactly we're dealing with here."

"I should probably mention we're on the clock," Disher sounded darker than ever, "They're keeping it a secret so the public doesn't panic, but Caucasian Provinces says they'll detonate on Christmas Eve if their demands aren't met. And they're pretty sure it's going to happen here, since the original threatening letter came from the metro area here."

Drastic silence filled the room. Ertley came running back in. "You cops better take a look at this again; I don't know how the hell we keep losing this stuff!" he cried.

"Well, back to the old radiation suits," the captain said, "Hold down the fort till we get back, Monk."

'Got it," Adrian made some hand measurements and rearranged the angels on either end of Ertley's desk so they were equidistant from each other. No sooner had the police left than the women entered the office; they'd gone off searching around the plant. "Anything?" the detective asked them.

"Have you been thinking about Don Wiley the guard as a suspect?" Natalie asked him.

"Not yet," Adrian said, "What did you find?"

"Only that he's got a one-way plane ticket to Karachi on his desk; it leaves in a couple of days; why would he not book a flight back?" she pointed out.

"You didn't tell me you found that!" Sharona griped, "I thought we had an agreement we'd share information!"

"You were checking out the reactor at the time," Natalie told her. It didn't make Adrian feel any better to see Sharona looking more jealous than ever. "I've got bad news," he told them to stop a fight from breaking out, "Whoever the guilty party is, they're planning a major terrorist attack here."

"What?" both women gasped. Adrian related to them what Disher had related to him. "So we'd better find out who it is soon, or a lot of people are going to get roasted," he said solemnly. They stared blankly at him until Stottlemeyer returned a few moments later, all suited up. "Good, you're back," he addressed the women, "Get suited; we've got more to look at; Monk, come on, I need someone with your eyes on this."

Adrian slowly bounded up the hall after him…so slowly, in fact, that Stottlemeyer was reluctantly forced to drag his compatriot along by the arm. "Not, not too hard, you'll stretch the fibers," Adrian protested.

They arrived at the waste storage area. "So, what do you see?" he asked impatiently, "I want to stop this here and now."

"Give him a minute," Stottlemeyer held up his hand, "Detective Monk needs to get in his zone."

"Yeah, got to get in the zone," Adrian walked around the room, "Don't want to commit a zoning violation." He stared at several barrels now marked with an X. "These have lost content?" he asked Don the guard over by the door.

"That's them," Don said. Adrian noticed an evasive look in the guard's eye, as if he wanted to hide something. "What security measures if any have you added since we were here two days ago?" he asked next.

"Check it out," Don waved him outside, "This is a hand scanner," he pointed to a rectangular square on the wall, "Only authorized personnel will be accepted inside. If they wear gloves to try and dupe it, we installed this," he gestured at a circle above the door, "It give a retinal eye scan to verify their identity."

"Since retinal eye patterns are as unique as fingerprints," Adrian nodded, "Good thought, great thought…and your badge is crooked."

He straightened it out for Don. "Thank you," the guard told him with a bizarre expression on his face.

"Just who are considered authorized personnel?" Disher asked.

"We've managed to narrow the list down to a little over a dozen people," Don said, "Mostly guards like myself. It must be someone among them who's stealing it."

"We'd like a copy of the list if you have it," Stottlemeyer told him.

"I can make a copy if you'd like," Don bustled off. A hustle of footsteps announced the arrival of Natalie and Sharona. "Did we miss anything?" the former asked.

"Not much really; whoever the thief is, they know the security functions of this room inside and out," Adrian said.

"I'm going to have to hire new security," Ertley shook his head, "People from the outside who I can trust."

"Which means more of our pension funds get sucked down the drain, I suppose?" Angela Moreno had been eavesdropping. Ertley rolled his eyes. "I said breaks were in the other wing here!" he said with barely restrained ire.

"He took out of our pension plans when he ran for mayor last year," Angela complained to the police, "Without telling any of us!"

"For the last time, I did NOT touch your union's slush funds!" Ertley bellowed, "Now don't you have a job to do?"

Angela turned to leave, but shouted over her shoulder at the cops, "I hope whoever is taking this junk keeps it up and sends this company down the tubes!"

"Aye aye aye aye aye!" Ertley put his hand over his face, "Down and night she never stops! It's always, 'this is too bad for me, Mr. Ertley, and this doesn't work!' And I can't fire her due to the special clauses in her contract! If I'd won that election, I'd be rid of the headache!"

"That was the really close race, wasn't it?" Disher asked.

"Yeah," Ertley said, "Lost by only nine hundred votes. I'll try again next year. I've got a good list of civic improvements I think can help San Jose in the long…"

"You wanted me to move the stuff, Mr. Ertley?" Jerry Malcolm had arrived.

"Yeah, go move some of the barrels to the auxiliary vault," Ertley told him, "That's more secure than this one."

"Nice to see you Jerry," Adrian approached him, "Rather sad the funeral, wasn't it?"

"The what?" Jerry said unconvincingly, "Oh, the little girl. Yeah, I know."

"It's a little curious why you'd be there," Natalie spoke up, "As far as I know, you don't know Clarissa or her family. And perhaps you'd like to explain why you ran away from the service?"

"I ran?" Jerry asked nervously, "Look, I looked at my watch and saw I was late for lunch with my wife. I had to book it all the way across town to make it in time."

"Funny," Adrian commented, "Your wife must be quite the hungry type to eat lunch at ten in the morning."

"Uh, well, um, she's, uh, I'd better do what my boss says and get these barrels to safety," Jerry quickly put some on a cart and pushed them out.

"Here's the list," Don came running back with a piece of paper, "I hope this helps."

"It should, thanks a lot," Stottlemeyer took it off him, "Mr. Ertley here mentioned the auxiliary vault; is that as safe as this one?"

"Even safer," Don said, "You need for different code cards to get to the vault, and the main airlock is voice-activated. And is has all of the features of this one included. I can predict there won't be any more thefts on my watch."

"Well, thank you for your time," Adrian shook both his and Ertley's hands, "Natalie, wipe," he held out his hand.

"You're wearing gloves," Natalie pointed out to him. "Oh," Adrian said, glancing at his perfectly safe fingers, "Oh, I'm just so used to it. Well, at any rate, if you have any more problems, Ed, let the captain know."

"I will," Ertley waved to them as they walked back down the hall. "That's strange," the detective stared at the paper Don had given Stottlemeyer, "He clearly has access to the waste during heightened security, but his name's not on this list."

Stottlemeyer scanned it. "You're right," he realized, "But what motive could he have, Monk?'

Adrian glanced back at Sharona, who was lagging behind. "Natalie found a plane…" he whispered in the captain's ear.

"You'll have to speak louder, Monk, I'm not getting that," Stottlemeyer said.

"I can't say it any louder, Captain."

"Why not?"

"Sharona would get upset."

"And you think that…?"

"Captain," Disher whispered loudly. The lieutenant put his finger to his lips and pointed around the corner. They peered around the edge to see an agitated Angela on a cell phone. "…not in a good mood!" she was shouting to someone on the other end, "They've found more waste is leaving this place! What have I to be worried about? How about that they might accuse me of taking it! If Ertley suspects me of anything, he'll call the authorities and have me sent up the river for life! I can't take that chance, just…why don't we just get things in order, and we'll figure out where to go from here, all right?"

She hung up roughly and stormed off, pushing two co-workers in radiation suits aside. "Very interesting,' Adrian breathed, "Very, very interesting."

* * *

"You're not going to snap, are you captain?" the detective asked him over the blaring of car horns behind them.

"It's been a half hour," the captain grumbled, "I can see no reason why we have to do this."

"Well, you didn't quite do it right the last time…"

"Answer me this, Monk; how can there possibly be a right and wrong way to go over a speed bump?" Stottlemeyer growled.

"I know the right way, and you did not go over it the right way," Adrian protested, "But you're starting to catch on; I think you'll get it right the next time."

"You've been saying that the last fifteen times I went over the bump!" Stottlemeyer gestured out the window toward the speed bump in question.

"Just once more, Captain?"

Stottlemeyer glanced back at him. "Last time," he said sternly. He reversed over the speed bump, drawing a loud horn blare from the car directly behind him, and drove forward over the bump yet again. "Wait, wait, wait, that wasn't quite right either," Adrian pointed out.

Disher broke up into laughter as his boss applied the brakes yet again. "Monk," he said, rising up in his seat, "We have driven over this speed bump FORTY DAMN TIMES!"

"Forty-three," Adrian corrected him, "They're just so hard…"

The radio suddenly crackled to life. "Captain are you there?" came the voice over the airwaves.

"I'm right here, Cargill; what is it?" Stottlemeyer picked up the receiver.

"Is everyone else there?"

"Yeah, so what is it?"

"All your houses except for Detective Monk's just exploded five minutes ago, including the one Sharona used to live at," Cargill said. Deathly silence filled the car. "What…was it a nuclear blast?" Stottlemeyer asked breathlessly.

"No, conventional explosives," Cargill eased their fears, "But get this; each site had a note left at the scene. Care to hear what it said?"

"Why not?"

"Whoever the guy was left the message, 'Dear Monk, even if you survive this, you're still a dead man. I'll get you and everyone close to you before the end of the holidays. Signed, The Goblin.'"

"The Goblin?" Adrian looked puzzled, "The Goblin? I don't know a Goblin."

"Sir, what are your orders?" Cargill asked.

"Uh, secure the areas and get a statement from the fire marshal; I'll be there as soon as I can," Stottlemeyer signed off. He collapsed into his seat. "If Karen hadn't insisted on taking the boys to the market…" he said weakly.

"And how would they know where I lived?" Sharona was equally in shock that she would be targeted.

"Someone involved in this caper knows too much," Adrian said slowly, "But why would they spare my apartment when they say in the note I'm the one they want?"

"Well, at any rate, now we've all got to find a new place to live until this all gets rebuilt," Natalie realized.

"And I think I know just the place," Stottlemeyer turned around to look at his star detective. "What?" Adrian asked naively.


	9. Too Full House

"How much longer is this going to take?" Stottlemeyer grumbled.

"International rules are until one side's king is in checkmate; knight to E-3," Ambrose made his move and hit the clock to his right. "Your turn," he told the members of the other team on the opposite side of the coffee table. They'd been playing with Ambrose's 3-D chess set for close to three hours now, since the children had immediately claimed Adrian's television set the moment the four families had moved into the detective's apartment (they were sitting on Ottomans they'd bought earlier in the day, as Adrian had made it clear he was uncomfortable with people sitting on his rug directly). It had been agreed they'd play men against women, but Karen Stottlemeyer had declined to join in, so Disher had joined with Sharona and Natalie, leaving his boss with the two teammates he least wanted.

The captain's radio buzzed at this moment. Stottlemeyer, believing "The Goblin" might make another attempt on their lives, had turned Adrian's apartment building into a practical fortress, with cops on every floor checking every person that entered the building. "Status check sir; everything clear," came the voice of one of his men on the other end, "No one suspicious around."

"Good work, Miller," Stottlemeyer told him. "Well, I think we'll be pretty safe in here," he said, moving his bishop to the middle of the board.

"That's easy for you to say," Adrian said softly, centering the captain's bishop on its square. He was already uncomfortable with having ten people under his not-so-big roof. His solution to working out the logistics of this was to divide his apartment into equal-sized sections for each family (for the sake of logistics, he'd convinced Ambrose to share a section with Disher), retaining his bedroom for himself. Each section had its own tent for the family to sleep in, their own hygienic utensils, and an instruction sheet detailing where they could put the personal items they'd been able to save from their homes and what in their section they were absolutely forbidden to touch. The kitchen and bathroom were for everyone, but Adrian had made it clear the latter could only be used at certain times. As such, he'd drawn up a very large chart stating who could use it at what times. He'd also instituted a trash schedule for everyone, but he could tell already with the amount of soda and juice the kids had already drank that he might have to revise it.

"You, you can't make that move," the detective informed Disher as he made his next move on the lower chessboard, "The galley moves like the rook."

"You sure?" Disher frowned.

"Absolutely," Ambrose interjected, "Prince moves like king, princess like queen, abbey like bishop, cannon like knight, and galley like rook."

"That's another thing," Stottlemeyer spoke up, "Why do they bother calling it a rook? It looks nothing like a crow."

"That's because it's another example of Anglicization," Ambrose informed him, "Rook comes from the Arabic _rokh_, meaning chariot. It became a tower battlement since that was the closest thing in Western culture to the piece's design. Both the queen and bishop are also named for this reason; in Arabic the queen is called the vizier, and…"

Stottlemeyer thumped his fists on the table in displeasure at being told what he considered meaningless points of chess, causing the pieces to shakes slightly and move around in their squares. Adrian scrambled to re-center them all. "Whatever you do, don't do that!" he pleaded his boss. Stottlemeyer gave him a look that made it clear he was already regretting his decision to stay at Adrian's.

"So chess is Arabic, then?" Natalie asked, moving a pawn on the top board to the left. Adrian grabbed it and centered it for her.

"Scholars are divided on it, since many cultures have games in their past traditions that incorporate elements of modern chess, but consensus nowadays is that it originated in northwest India," Ambrose said, moving his right knight forward on the middle board to capture one of Sharona's pawns. She sighed in frustration; already Ambrose had relieved her of six pieces.

"Yep, those Indians must have had a load of time on their hands to spend hours doing this," Stottlemeyer said, zipping his king backwards out of the way of one of Disher's bishops. The lieutenant eagerly moved his bishop forward toward his boss's abbey, only to have Stottlemeyer capture it from across the board with his queen. "That was pretty obvious," he informed a stunned Disher.

"Hey," Benjy entered the room with his script and approached Ambrose, "I wrote you into this. Do you like it?"

"Where am I?" Ambrose took it and leafed through it. "I take it you're taking licenses here for dramatic effect, since we weren't meeting on a regular basis at this point in time," he said.

"I felt it would make more sense if you made up with him before the end of the story," Benjy informed him, "It gives the audience closure that you're friends with him again."

Ambrose stared at two particular lines he'd been allotted. "I wouldn't say this or this, but otherwise this is looking pretty good," he lauded the boy, "I think this has a pretty good chance of publication if you can get the right publisher."

"Thanks," Benjy grinned and walked back into the living room. "I think this could be the start of something big," the instruction manual writer said, capturing one of Sharona's rooks, "My brother the movie star; who would have thought of it?"

"Indeed," Adrian agreed, capturing a cannon off Natalie on the top level with his galley, "And I don't really think my life that interesting to…don't drink that much, Ambrose. Your Sprite'll be uneven with our drinks."

He gestured to his bottle of Sierra Springs and Stottlemeyer's coffee cup, which were lined up perfectly. Ambrose shrugged and removed it from his lips. "So I've been thinking about the case," he said as Adrian lined it up perfectly with the other drinks, "I think that the one thing we need to look at most is opportunity and motive. Who stands the best chance of getting that waste out of the plant, and why?"

"I say it's Don Wiley the guard," Natalie proposed, checking her boss's queen, "He has opportunity; he could shut off the alarms when he needed. And since he works nights too, he can get it out without being observe too much."

"How does he get them out, though?" Ambrose posed, "Did you see anything he might use to carry it that would irradiate him?"

"Not yet," she admitted, shaking her head as Adrian swept up her abbey from behind with his bishop. "He's going to Pakistan and not coming back, though; that's got to be suspicious."

"It would seem it on first glance, but I thought I read that his brother's a missionary over there," Ambrose took another sip of Sprite, prompting his brother to drink a similar amount of his Sierra Springs, "Then again, there's also a load of extremists in that region, so if he is indeed guilty, he'd certainly have buyers."

"Only it's not foreign extremists behind these thefts, Ambrose, it's homegrown terrorists," Adrian pointed out, once again centering every piece on the board, causing everyone to groan, "Unless the Pakistanis are funding it, though."

"Well, I think it's Angela Moreno," Disher moved a pawn ahead and promptly lost it to Stottlemeyer's knight, "She's got the motive, and backup that could support her in a crisis."

"But from the list she hasn't got access to the stuff anymore, Randy," Stottlemeyer pointed out, "And that vault clearly wasn't broken into even the first time."

"Well, she could have stolen someone else's card key, or perhaps threatened someone else to do it for her; she's clearly not the type to be above intimidation," Disher pressed his point."

"So I've read," Ambrose captured Sharona's queen. He was now closing in on her king, "And true, she might have put someone up to it."

"That's an interesting point, Ambrose," his brother said, taking out another of Natalie's pawns, "It may very well be a conspiracy; two or more of these suspects—or other suspects we don't know about—could in fact be behind this."

"Aren't we forgetting that it took a master chemist to put that poison together in the first place?" Sharona interceded, jerking her king away from Ambrose's queen, "That points definitely to Jerry Malcolm. He's there every day; he could scoop up as much as he wanted any time he wanted, and he'd be able to put it together perfectly so it could kill an elephant but not irradiate him. And he was at the girl's funeral."

"It's not him," Ambrose said quickly, continuing his assault against her king.

"And how can you be sure?" she demanded.

"His father's one of my major customers, sells paper shredders. Anyway, they're hardcore Quakers. Joining white supremacist groups would be against every grain of their existence…and, checkmate."

Sharona glared at him. "You had an unfair advantage from the start," she complained.

"Three hours a week playing against myself, I'm still undefeated. Good game though," Ambrose extended his hand to her. She only reluctantly shook it.

"And on that note, Ambrose, Jerry told me at one point when he was alone that he considers Manny his best friend in the plant," Adrian was now assaulting Natalie's prince, "I know it's true because there's pictures of the two of them together all over his desk. It's very unlikely he'd try and frame someone he cares for that much."

"Well maybe he digitally altered Manny's image over someone else; I just have a deep down feeling it's him, Adrian," Sharona grasped at straws.

"I don't think so, Sharona," the detective shook his head slowly. His heart sank when she reacted by jumping to her feet roughly. "I know," she glowered, "I'm just wrong about everything, aren't I?"

"I didn't say that, I…Sharona, it's not you turn for the bathroom," Adrian called after her as she skulked toward it and slammed the door. The detective put a hand to his face. "I know she's going to throw the toilet paper all over the place, I just know it," he moaned.

"That's a good point, though, that they'd have to know a lot about chemistry," Ambrose started putting his pieces away. Adrian took them off him and started putting them perfectly lined up in the bag. "Thanks," the instruction manual writer told him, "Anyway, one of these people other than Jerry Malcolm has to be an amateur chemist. Whoever it is is probably our guilty party."

"Actually, I've got another suspect for us here," Stottlemeyer captured Disher's knight after the lieutenant had foolishly left it out in the open, "I ran a check through the files in search of any disgruntled employees. One name came up; Bud Harms. He was fired after hitting Ertley about a year ago and swore revenge, and he's definitely got extremist ties. And his job at the plant, ladies and gentlemen, was working in the lab with our man Jerry, so he knows his stuff about making poison."

"Again, what about access to the waste? How does he get in to get it; checkmate," Adrian cornered Natalie's king. She sighed and more readily shook his hand than Sharona had with Ambrose's. "You two are good," she confessed to the brothers, "Have you ever considered joining tournaments?"

"And leave my house?" Ambrose protested.

"Right now you don't have a house," Adrian reminded him.

"I will in the near future," Ambrose told him, "Maybe Dad'll kick in some money when he shows up here…"

"He's not showing up here, Ambrose," it was Adrian's turn to shake his head.

"Oh just you wait and see!" Ambrose said indignantly, "After these bombs all went off, he's got to…"

Stottlemeyer's radio buzzed again before the argument could get more heated. "Sir, a letter addressed to Miss Teeger just got slipped under the door," announced another officer.

"A what?" Stottlemeyer's eyes darted to Natalie, who looked as puzzled as to the matter as he was, "Well, check it for any germs or explosives, and if it's kosher, send it up, Beats," the captain told the officer.

"We already did, sir," the officer informed him, "It looks like it's from her apparently late husband."

"I'll go check it," Natalie rose up, looking strange, Adrian thought. She walked out the door. "And checkmate," Stottlemeyer cornered Disher's king. "We win," he told the Monk brothers, "I still think this is a stupid and wasteful game, but we just rolled, and that's always something you'd like."

"Thank you," Ambrose managed a smile, something he, like his brother, rarely did. "While we're thinking about who might be involved in this, let's think of this: how would they know exactly where we all live?"

"That's something I've been wondering about too," Adrian helped his brother disassemble the chessboards, "I think there's something else at work here that…"

The unmistakable sound of a candy bar crunching from the living room caught his attention. "Oh no!" he groaned, barreling through the curtains he'd painstakingly hung throughout his apartment to delineate each section (he'd taken care to color code each curtained section: red for the Flemings, green for the Teegers, purple for the Stottlemeyers, gray for Ambrose and Disher, and a blue curtain sealed off his own bedroom). "Jared!" the detective cried, staring in horror at the boy, who was holding a Mars bar in his fist.

"I was hungry!" Jared said in self-defense. Without answering, Adrian rushed to his closet, dragged out his vacuum, plugged it in, and began frantically vacuuming the floor between the sofa and the TV along the diagonal lines. "We can't hear the TV, Mr. Monk!" Julie complained, pointing to the screen, on which Home Alone 2 was playing. Adrian responded by reaching for the remote—but stopping midstream to pull out a wipe and give it a thorough wiping down—and jacking up the volume to an almost ear-splitting level before returning to his wild vacuuming.

"Monk, what the hell are you doing in there?" Stottlemeyer yelled in, his voice practically drowned out by the sounds of Harry and Marv being nailed with the tool chest Kevin had thrown at them on the screen.

"Just performing my civic duty as the manager here at Hotel Monk," Adrian called back at the top of his lungs. He shut off the vacuum and nodded. "That should do it for now," he said, breathing a large sigh of relief, "Better make sure later, though."

"You've got THREE SOFAS in here?" Max stared in amazement at them stacked inside the open closet.

"I like to be sure," Adrian told him as he pushed the vacuum back into the closet, "Just in case, you know."

"Just in case of what?" Karen had to ask him. Adrian didn't answer, because at that moment Natalie returned. "Mr. Monk, I'd like to have you for a minute," she called at him, looking misty-eyed. Adrian followed her into her allotted section of the apartment. "What did the letter say?" he asked her.

"I think it might really be Mitch, Mr. Monk," Natalie handed the letter to him, which he took hold of with his tweezers, "Look at this: he knows our anniversary date, and that we went to Paris, he knows Julie's birthday, he knows the exact date and circumstances he disappeared, he knows where we first met; he knows a lot of things only Mitch would know."

"This is typed," Adrian examined the letter, "Where would he get a computer?"

"Well maybe he stopped by the library; they have free access computers there," Natalie countered. She glanced through the curtains at the living room. "I think it's about time I told Julie about this. It's time she knows."

"Why? Don't," Adrian pleaded her.

"And why not, Mr. Monk? I think she deserves to know her father might well be alive and well after all."

"And what if he's not?" Adrian said loudly, "If you build her hopes up, and it turns out not to be true, her heart's going to shatter into a million pieces. I don't think you want her to feel like that."

"Yeah, that would be a tragedy," came a sarcastic barb from the bathroom.

"What's that supposed to mean?" Natalie demanded.

"You're the detective; you figure it out!" snapped Sharona.

"I'll, I'll handle this, you just go do what you want to do," Adrian told his current assistant. He walked over to the bathroom door (he'd taped a large copy of the bathroom schedule on it, along with a sign labeled, THE MANAGEMENT RESERVES THE RIGHT TO EVICT YOU FROM THIS BATHROOM IF YOU GO OVER THE ALOTTED TIME LIMIT OR IN EVENT OF EMERGENCIES. THERE ARE NO EXCEPTIONS TO THIS RULE). "I, I think your time in here's up, Sharona, he called in, "And house policies are not to insult others here."

"Tell me something, Adrian, was I just along for the ride?" came Sharona's voice.

"What, I don't, what is that supposed to mean?"

"You know what it means. Did you really appreciate me helping you, or was I just there to make you feel better?"

"I don't…that makes no sense whatsoever. Of course I appreciated you," Adrian said. He forced himself to sound authoritarian. "And I really don't like your tone of voice, young lady."

"Well you could have fooled me," Sharona growled, "After all, you're always right and I'm always wrong!"

"I never said that!"

"You just as much said it with every gesture you made!"

"I don't talk without speaking, if that's what you're getting at."

"Once again, you're blissfully and completely out of it, Adrian! Not to mention you still have no concern for my feelings!"

"OK, that's it, you're, you're grounded missy," Adrian said with poorly forced anger, "No, no TV, no computer, no nothing until Christmas. Now come on out of there and go to your sector. You're grounded."

"Oh yeah? Why don't you come in and make me?" Sharona dared him. Adrian stood and stared at the door. There was now way he could, even if he wanted to.


	10. Holiday Session with Dr Kroger

"She's definitely feeling hurt and useless," Adrian was saying the next morning, "I can just see the pain in her eyes. I know what it's like; I've felt useless a lot myself."

"I see," Dr. Charles Kroger leaned forward in his armchair, "And how do you feel about it?"

"How do I feel?" Adrian thought this over for a minute, "It feels like it's a Cold War between her and Natalie, and I'm freezing to death in the middle. I hate to admit it, especially to her, but the fact is Natalie's getting good, she's been instrumental in helping me solve some cases. Unless it was medical-related, Sharona really couldn't see that many things—which isn't her fault, she is who she is—but that's the way it is. I'm just starting to get comfortable with Natalie, finally, and then this has to happen and tear open thoughts of what might have been."

"Well, Adrian, I want you to keep in mind that you're not at fault," his psychiatrist reassured him, "Sharona made her own choices. They may have been right or they may have been wrong, but they're entirely her own choices."

"May have been right or wrong?" Adrian was a little skeptical of this assessment, "Her husband's serving a 770 year term for what he tried to do to her in Chicago. He was very lucky not to get the death penalty; I could tell the jury was considering it."

"Adrian, my suggestion is to talk to Sharona about how her attitude toward the matter makes you feel," Dr. Kroger advised him, "I think she'd be understanding if you say you feel you're being hurt."

"Well, it might work…if she'd let me, and I don't think she will," Adrian told him, "This morning I think she turned up the radio deliberately to wake me up early. I only got two hours of sleep last night; they were all using the bathroom when I went into the room for the night; I spent two hours cleaning after them."

He pointed to the dark circles under his eyes to illustrate his point. Dr. Kroger nodded. "So, on that point, you said earlier you've been hearing that Natalie's husband may be alive, and that worried you?" he asked next.

"Of course it worries me," Adrian's gaze had fallen on a poinsettia inside the vase of the windowsill of Dr. Kroger's office that was longer than the others. His internal alarm was starting to go off. He strained hard to ignore it. "If he is alive," he continued, "She's clearly going to go back to him, and I'll be stuck in the lurch again. I've lost so many people I cared for all throughout my life; I don't want to lose another one."

"I understand," Dr. Kroger looked at him, "What makes you so sure she would walk out if he's alive?"

"I know," Adrian gave him a world-weary look, "Like Rod Stewart says in that song, some guys have all the luck, and I'm not one of them."

"Well Adrian, I'm sure if he's back, you could sit down with Mitch and talk over the situation," Dr. Kroger suggested, "From what Natalie says of him, he'd probably be understanding of the matter. You have to realize people will not resist you vehemently on everything."

"Only I'm just so used to it," Adrian stared intently at the odd poinsettia. The craving was getting stronger and stronger…

"Um, moving right along," Dr. Kroger consulted his notes, "You said on the phone that you felt like you were becoming 'emotionally deficient.' What did you mean by that?"

"Lately, I can't make people feel any better," Adrian told him, not taking his eyes off the poinsettia, "Every time I try to comfort them, I only make the situation worse."

"And what do you think causes that?"

"I guess I'm just so used to being at the receiving end of misery that I can't quite reciprocate what you and everyone else tells me…excuse me," Adrian could hold it no longer. He rose up and walked over to the windowsill. Drawing his nail clippers, he cut the long poinsettia's stem so it was close to the other flowers. Returning to his seat, he went on, "The people who have been good to me when I was bleeding on my knees deserve better than that when they go through crises."

The psychiatrist stared at his clipped flower. "A, Adrian, you have to realize that some people are better equipped to deal with others' emotional baggage," he told the detective, "Again, it's not your fault if you're not as good at comforting others than other people. You're just one of those people."

"I know, I know, it's…excuse me again," Adrian rushed back over to the windowsill and gave all the poinsettias a clipping. "There, all even now," he said in relief.

"OOOOOK," Dr. Kroger said slowly, "So, I understand you're letting everyone stay at your place for the holidays, until their houses can be rebuilt. How does that make you feel?"

"Like everything else with me, good and bad," Adrian told him, "So far it's been a nightmare, a complete nightmare. I'm basically stuck in my bedroom."

"Why's that?"

"I can't infringe in their sectors any more than they can infringe in mine," the detective said, "Fair is fair. Couple with that the amount of garbage we're going to have to through out till New Years' and you can imagine how it feels on the down side."

He grew strangely sentimental. "But on the up side," he continued, "It does feel good to be able to share the holidays with others. That's what Christmas is all about, after all: coming together with others."

"Christmas was lonely for you when you were younger?" Dr. Kroger inquired.

"Exactly," Adrian told him, "Most of my life it was just my mother and Ambrose, and that wasn't exactly what you'd call a social get-together. And I never really got any real toys, just encyclopedias and scientific equipment like microscopes. Everyone else had family, friends, and whatever presents they wanted. Like Eric Hart and Rochelle Tracey, for example. They had everything at Christmas. That wasn't the least of the reasons I wanted to be like them…what's up with those flowers?"

He jumped up again and gave the poinsettias yet another cutting. "So basically," he told his psychiatrist, "You're talking to someone here who never liked Christmas at all for many years." He looked upwards. "Trudy, on the other hand, loved it. Even in Los Angeles where they had no snow, she felt there was something special about the holidays. During our seven years together, she almost managed to change me over to her point of view. For once I didn't care about decorations being out of alignment, or the rampant colds that sprung up during ever Christmas season. I remember this one year she called together a group of her friends here to go on a caroling expedition through the city, and I volunteered to join up. I never told her while she was alive, but that was one of the best evenings of my life, walking around, spreading good feelings to others. I felt like I was doing something positive for others. I even lasted through midnight mass afterwards, which was in itself a miracle, since churches are disease deathtraps."

"I see," Dr. Kroger nodded again, "And since she's died, you've basically given up on Christmas again, I take it?"

"It's not worth really celebrating without her," Adrian said dismally, "Trying to celebrate it would just bring back memories I don't want to have surface again. And who could I invite? Everyone at the precinct has their own families they go with, Ambrose wouldn't come over if his house hadn't exploded on him, and apart from those two, and there's no one outside either of those groups that's really close to me."

"Well, I'm sure there would be some people you know who wouldn't mind coming over," Dr. Kroger said.

"I don't think so," Adrian shook his head, "The other day I ran into Ben from Pross Financial on the street; he turned his back and walked the other way when I waved hello. If I'd want anyone over, it would have been the Pross group. They made me feel welcome before the bowling fiasco made…what is with this bouquet?"

He ran to the sill again and started cutting away at the stems. When he was done this time, the flowers disappeared from sight into the vase, now only being half as long as the vase itself. "Oh," the detective said sheepishly, realizing he'd made another mistake, "Well, at least now they're good and even. Would it be okay if I bought you another set?"

"If you feel like it," Dr, Kroger said, his hand over his face.

There was a pounding on the office door. "The hour's up!" came a gruff shouting that Adrian recognized all too well. "Wait your turn, Harold!" the detective yelled out at him, "We've got a poinsettia crisis in here!"

"Actually, Adrian, the hour is up," Dr. Kroger showed his watch, "So, I guess we'll put you down for next week at…"

"Make it tentative," Adrian told him, "If we don't catch the bad guys by Christmas Eve, they'll irradiate the whole city, and coming in again would be kind of pointless."

The pounding on the door resumed. "Keep your pants on!" Adrian yelled at Harold, "This may be your last checkup too if they detonate!"

"Anyway, I'll put you down tentatively, for this time at one," Dr. Kroger filled out a note and handed it to his patient, "And don't worry about Christmas, Adrian, I think you're going to enjoy it this year."

He had a strange look in his eye that Adrian couldn't quite place. "Ten more seconds and I'm coming in!" Harold shouted outside, "You're a minute over schedule!"

"I'm coming out, I'm coming out!" Adrian left the office. "The garland!" he shrieked, staring at a strand on the wall that had once been perfectly wrapped around an announcement board, but was now stretched above and the to sides of it. "What did you do to the garland!" he shouted accusingly at Harold.

"I fixed your mess!" Harold told him smarmily, "Learn to like it."

He closed the office door behind himself. Adrian rushed to the garland, wipes over his hands, and tried to set it back to normal. "As if I didn't have enough problems already!" he moaned to himself as he went about it.


	11. Running Out of Time

"Thanks for giving me a lift," Manny told Adrian and Natalie as they pulled up in front of his house. Due to the weaknesses in the case against him that Adrian had brought up, and since there was little evidence against him to begin with, he'd been freed and exonerated.

"Any time, Manny," Adrian told him. Inside, the detective was very, very nervous. Christmas Eve was now upon them, and they were now down to just ten hours to find the mastermind of the planned nuclear blast. The past two days had yielded practically nothing to them, although they'd finally located Bud Harms in a motel about thirty miles south of San Francisco on Route 101 the previous night. He would be arriving for questioning in about forty minutes, judging by the clock on Natalie's dashboard just before it went dark as she shut off the engine.

The detective was preparing for the potential holocaust. He'd packed up Trudy's picture and poems and locked them in a safe place. Many of the rest of his personal items that were inside his sector of the apartment were at the moment being catalogued by Ambrose and readied for transport. The children had been ferried over to a posh hotel in the downtown district where Natalie's family—who'd called about two nights ago to say they'd decided to come to town for Christmas—was to be staying. They were on call, ready to get as far away from the city as possible at a moment's notice from Stottlemeyer.

"Thanks for believing in Santa, too," Manny continued as they climbed out of the car, "I knew he'd never kill the chief."

"Well, obviously, Manny. What purpose would a man so devoted to giving to millions of others have in poisoning a police chief?" Adrian said, trying hard to suppress his own rarely used sarcasm.

"It must have been his evil twin Stanley Claus after all," Manny reasoned, "I believe L. Frank Baum said in The Life and Times of Santa Claus that…"

"I don't think Stan was the killer, Manny," Adrian told him, playing around with a piece of mistletoe hanging next to a large plastic cutout Santa on Manny's gate, "It's someone who lives in this area, trying to set Kris Kringle up."

"Mr. Nast," a kindly looking old woman came scurrying over toward them, "I held all your mail for you."

She handed him a thick wad of letters. "Thanks Mrs. Hunter," Manny told her. He eagerly looked through the wad. "Nope, nothing from Santa here. But tonight, I'll meet him in person."

"You're not seriously considering waiting on the roof all night for a sleigh and eight reindeer to appear?" Natalie inquired, her eyebrows raised.

"Doesn't everyone?" Manny countered, "Well, seeing how they're calling for fog, I'm guessing he's going to use Rudolph tonight. As soon as I see his nose in the sky, I'll send up some flares. Better check to make sure I have enough."

He dashed into his house. "Lucky you, having to live next to him this time of year," Natalie confided in Mrs. Hunter.

"Well, he's harmless, and it's only a month," Mrs. Hunter seemed nonplussed by her neighbor's habits, "Indeed, things have gotten a bit brighter since he moved in here after he got out of the asylum."

"Manny said the Howard Nuclear Plant got this house for him," Adrian said, producing his nail file and scraping away at Cupid's right antler on the large replica of the sleigh on Manny's front lawn. This had been gnawing away at his for some time now as being important somehow.

"Yes," Mrs. Hunter told him, "They even set it up for them before he moved in. They sent a team down that worked inside it all night long about a week before he arrived."

"Did they now?" Adrian stood up, "You didn't happen to see anything out of the ordinary going on in the house during that time?"

"No," the old woman said, "I feel it rude to snoop. But I could hear them sawing and drilling like there was no tomorrow. And then the night before Mr. Taylor was killed across the street, a loud thumping and dragging sound from his house awakened me. I assumed Mr. Nast was moving some furniture around."

"Very interesting," Adrian was now scraping Dancer's antlers. "Why is this so important, Mr. Monk?" Natalie had to ask him.

"They're uneven, in by some chance Santa would happen to show up, I think he'd like…and Blitzen's hoof's too big there, too," the detective started toward it, but his assistant took the file out of his hands and shook her head at him.

"Hey," Manny had reappeared on the porch, "Care for some milk and cookies before you go."

"Of course, Manny," Adrian said quickly. This would give him a prime opportunity to look inside the house. The moment he stepped inside the shrine to Saint Nick, he saw something out of the ordinary. "Manny, do you remember how that mark ended up on the floor?" he asked, pointing to a long white scrape mark on the floor."

"Funny, I never noticed this," Manny stared at it, "The night I saw Santa, I slept in till just about the time you guys showed up. Nothing fell over, I know that much."

"I see," Adrian's gaze had fallen to a large portrait of Santa over the fireplace, drawn like one of the Haddon Sundblom Coca-Cola ads. "Is your safe behind here?" he asked Manny, who nodded. The detective produced two wipes and slowly pushed the portrait aside. "Natalie, look at this," he pointed to the wall directly around the safe, "There's noticeable scrape marks here; the wood's broken toward us, so the safe was pulled out of the wall."

"But if it was, it's back here now, and pretty well set in place," Natalie gave the safe a hard yank. It didn't budge an inch. "And it's clearly too heavy to move," she added, "I believe what you're saying, but it doesn't seem to make sense."

"I know," Adrian agreed. And there wasn't much time for them to find out anymore.

* * *

"So, Bud, I've heard you're a pretty good chemist," Stottlemeyer was grilling Harms inside the precinct's interrogation room. From his position behind the one-way mirror on the wall, Adrian observed the scene before him closely. Harms didn't look the least bit nervous—compared to Stottlemeyer, who was dripping in sweat, given the fast-approaching deadline—and from what the detective could see, his pulse wasn't speeding up at all.

"Yeah, I used to be a top-flight chemist for Howard," Harms said, "But that was before they turned on me."

"Oh really? Well Bud, ten witnesses claim you drunkenly slugged Ed Ertley for no good reason," the captain countered, "And our little database shows you were part of Caucasian Provinces for a while."

"OK, I see, blame the guy with the rap, nice going," Harms said curtly.

"This is dead serious, Bud!" Stottlemeyer could barely contain his frustration, "Some of your old cronies are planning something terrible tonight! Now are you going to help us or not?"

"I could if I knew a damn thing what you were talking about, but this whole thing, whether you choose to believe it or not, is news to me!" Harms told him, "I haven't even been in San Jose since I got axed! If you ask me, this sounds like Angela Moreno's work. She was always determined to bring down the company by any means necessary. I should also tell you that while she was moving up to shop steward, she earned the nickname, "The Goblin" since she was so ruthless."

"Do tell," Stottlemeyer's expression lightened, "Well now, if you're willing to make a statement on…."

Adrian rapped on the mirror. What was that?" Harms asked, looking around.

"Uh, that's nothing," Stottlemeyer told him. When the knocking failed to stop, however, he sighed in resignation. "Would you excuse me for a minute?" he asked his suspect. "What is so important, Monk?" he asked his go-to man once he'd joined him outside.

"It's not him, Captain," Adrian told him, "His blood pressure's remained constant throughout; he knows nothing of the plan."

"His blood pressure?" Stottlemeyer was amazed Adrian could judge a man's innocence by this method. "Well, as you may heard, Monk, he's got Angela Moreno down as a prime suspect; this matches a lot of…"

"Captain," Disher approached them, "We just found two dead bodies in the sewer under Telegraph Hill. They're both Caucasian Provinces members."

He held out a sheet to his boss. "Louis Armani and John Pole," Stottlemeyer read off it, "Yeah, I've heard of these cretins; hate crime muggings around Fisherman's Wharf."

"You want to know what's more amazing?" Disher asked him. He paused for a long time. "Yes, yes I do Randy, just spit it out!" the captain bellowed.

"Armani was Chief Richard Taylor's primary informant," Disher told him, "He'd grown disenchanted with the plot and was going to sell out his buddies."

"He didn't happen to give the head guy's name, did he?"

"No sir, he was too afraid of retaliation, but he did give Chief Taylor enough specifics about the bomb and where they might be planting it," Disher said, "It appears Caucasian Provinces has backup sites staked out in case their primary bomb site is discovered."

"What was their primary site, Randy?"

"Right underneath the Pyramid, sir," Disher looked grim.

"Dear God," Stottlemeyer looked dreadful, "That would kill at least ten thousand people. Call the state national guard and have them sweep the whole building."

"They're doing it now, sir," Disher said, "They haven't found anything yet."

"Tell them to keep looking," Stottlemeyer ordered him, "We can't keep a lid on this any longer; call the press and tell them to start evacuations immediately. I want as many trained bomb experts searching this city looking for the backup sites."

"Will do sir," Disher scurried off. Stottlemeyer dialed his cell phone. "Honey, it's me," he told Karen, "Get out of town; this is now an emergency. Call the Davenports and tell them to take the kids with them. Tell them you'll meet up on the rest stop nearest to Redding on I-5, that should be far enough away from the epicenter. Don't worry, I'll be fine, just save yourself. If anything happened to you or the boys, I'd…yes, I know I said…"

"Captain, look at this," Adrian pointed at the rap sheet, "John Pole was a professional chemist." He stared at pictures of the dead bodies Disher had brought along with him, "He's got dark circles under his eyes. He helped make the poison that killed Clarissa."

"Uh, Monk may have something here, Karen, I'll call you back, just get out on the highway and make sure the kids are fine," Stottlemeyer told his wife, "Yeah, stop by their place and pick them up if you want, that'll probably be better actually. Talk to you later."

He hung up and looked at the photos. "How can you be sure, Monk?" he asked the detective.

Adrian gave him a definitive look that didn't need an answer. "OK, but who's he taking orders from?" he asked, "Tell me you know it's Angela Moreno; that would make it so much easier."

"I wish I could, but I can't," Adrian squeezed his eyes shut in frustration.

"You can't say that it is her, or you don't know who it is?"

"I don't know who it is," Adrian admitted, "I know the answers right there, I just can't see it!"

"Well I hope your vision clears soon, Monk, because we've got just six more hours to bring them in," Stottlemeyer held his watch to the detective's face, "Anyway, go back to your place, get Sharona and your brother and get them to safety."

"Shouldn't I hang around for…"

"No, I need you safe!" Stottlemeyer surprisingly shouted at him.

Adrian winced at the rebuttal. "Well, it's going to be hard to press Sharona to do anything I say, you've seen it firsthand," he pointed out. Not surprisingly, Sharona had responded to being grounded with civil disobedience. Over the last few days, the detective had been awakened too early by loud music, found his toilet unflushed by the nurse—who'd frequently gone the bathroom during times not allotted to her—discovered things rearranged all over the apartment, and other annoying nuisances. His efforts to get her to relent had been fruitless.

"Look, I don't want to see anything happen to her either; if she refuses to leave, drag her out," Stottlemeyer encouraged him, "It's not…"

His cell phone rang. "Yeah?" he asked into it, "It's for you, Monk."

He held it to the detective's ear. "Yes?" Adrian asked. His expression dropped like a rock. "They're doing WHAT, Ambrose? Oh you've got to be…I don't believe…not now! How can they…how can she…are you sure it's…I'll be there as soon as I can."

He rushed to the door. "Natalie, start the car, we've got a crisis!" he yelled into the holding room.

"What, what happened, Monk?" Stottlemeyer asked him, concerned.

"Several things," Adrian told him, looking meek, "For one, Sharona's out of control. But more severely, I think Eric and Rochelle Hart just had me removed from the case judiciously!"

"They what?" the captain looked stunned, "They can't legally do that!"

"I'm afraid they've got a document that's official," Adrian shook his head, "Once again, I think I'm screwed."

And without waiting for Stottlemeyer's response, he rushed toward the door, feeling miserable for the umpteenth time in his life. Now when he needed to be able to help people the most, he probably wasn't going to be able to.


	12. Mr Monk's Old Assistant Gets Drunk

"Wrong lane, wrong lane!" Adrian pointed at the road ahead of them. It had been a slow go back to his apartment due to traffic clogging the roads. The evacuation was not going as smoothly as Stottlemeyer would have hoped, as all roads out of town were jammed tight, and even the commandeering of the city's buses and trains by the state National Guard to assist those without ready transportation, it was going to be a nightmare getting everyone to safety. ""Stop sign!" he pointed out.

"Who cares?' Natalie didn't. She swerved into a remarkable open space in front of his apartment. No sooner had they left the car than a sleazy-looking man in a worn-out trench coat approached them. "Adrian Monk?" he asked the detective.

"That's me," Adrian had a sinking feeling what was coming next.

"It's my duty to present you with this court order forbidding you to undertake any further activity on the case concerning the death of Clarissa Hart by order of her parents," the man handed him a document.

"This is utterly insane!" Natalie protested, "He's been working harder than you can imagine to try and crack this case for them!"

A squealing of tires indicated Stottlemeyer's arrival. "What's going on here?" he demanded as he jumped to the sidewalk.

"Captain Leland Stottlemeyer?" the man inquired.

"Yes. You're from that slimeball law firm Cess, Poole and Drane, aren't you?"

"You are also ordered to cease and desist in the investigation of Clarissa Hart and…"

"How can they do this?" Stottlemeyer thundered, looking like want to tear the document up in his hands.

"Because you didn't listen to us," came the voice of Eric Hart from around the corner. He and his wife strolled into view, looking triumphant. "I specifically told you we didn't want Monk on this case, Captain, but you didn't listen, so now you're going to have to live with the consequences."

Stottlemeyer sputtered in disgust. "I am investigating a major domestic terrorist threat here!" he growled, "And I couldn't have gotten half of the information I've received without the aid of Detective Monk!"

"The fact remains, you broke your word to us," Rochelle retorted, "As such we have filed this injunction against the two of you."

"So I see," Natalie was now getting rather venomous herself, "You're acting out of self-hatred for Detective Monk, so much so you're blinded by it!"

"Stay out of this Natalie!" Rochelle snapped.

"No I will not!" she roared, "He's been so bent on trying to help you and your husband, and all you can do is spit in his face! Well, you want to take us off this case, that's fine with me! The two of you can live with eternal regret not having closure! I go through it everyday with my husband, and it's a nightmare!" After a moment's pause, she followed this up with, "Quite frankly, Clarissa didn't deserve either of you as parents!"

This stunned the Harts into silence. From upstairs in the apartment came an abrupt crashing sound. Adrian shuddered in distaste. "This is ridiculous!" Stottlemeyer was still ranting. He took a hard look at the injunction document. "Judge Ira Lipton, huh? I know him, I'll set this damn thing straight!"

He started dialing his cell again. Another crash reached the ground. Adrian ran inside and barreled up the stairs. Ambrose was out in the hall, looking quite displeased. "I've been trying to talk some sense into her all day," he said quickly as his brother approached, "She's stoned clean out of her skull, and now she's been rooting through my files for no reason."

"How much?" Adrian asked him.

"At least six bottles, probably more, primarily Pabst; I've been trying to find them so she can't get any worse," Ambrose said, "Good luck."

"Yeah," Adrian took one look inside the apartment and shuddered, "I think I'm going to need it."

He cautiously walked inside. The curtains he'd separated each section with were askew, and most of the furniture had been overturned. The stench of alcohol was ripe in the air. He shook his head sadly. If he'd known it could have come to this…

"Sharona?" he called out. A loud burping sound from the kitchen gave her away. He inched toward it. The nurse was hung over the sink making unpleasant noises. The detective took special dislike in the fact that she'd spread out all the utensils all over the kitchen. "What, what have I told you," he said, unable to make himself truly sound stern, "No drinking when you're grounded, young lady!"

Sharona ever so slowly turned to face him. "How'd you get in?" she asked slurrily.

"This is my house, I have a key," he said, helping her to a chair, "If, if you're going to throw up, we agreed, you'd do so in a double sealed specially designed vomit bag that you'd find in the designated section over there," he pointed to them in the corner, thankfully untouched.

"I don't have to do anything you say," Sharona slurred, "You never did anything for me."

'Now that's, that's not true," he said, trying to stay calm, "Think of all those times I saved your life, like down in the sewers when…"

Noticing she was about to upchuck, he ran as fast as he could to the vomit bags and brought over several at once. He closed his eyes, unable to watch it unfold in front of him. Once she was done, he quickly sealed the bags, dumped them in the trash, and started washing his hands crazily. "You're lucky Benjy's with Natalie's family," he tried his best to scold her, "You're not setting the best of…"

"Five years with you, and not one word of thanks," she continued ranting, "But obviously you didn't need me."

"Of course I needed you," he said, drying his hands off with an untouched towel, "Sharona, you helped pull me out of my funk more than anyone or anything else."

"Yeah right," she snorted,"where'd I put that can?"

'You're not having anymore," Adrian told her, "I can tell you've had enough. And you did help me, honest."

"For what? You never paid me anything, Adrian."

"I paid you."

"Oh sure, too bad you'd have to use Little Miss Perfect to find it."

"Little Miss Perfect? Natalie's not perfect, far from it."

"Well you could have fooled me," Sharona wasn't buying it. She lurched toward the counter, apparently looking for more beer, "She's certainly more perfect than I am."

"I think you need to lay down for a little bit," Adrian hesitantly reached for her hand.

"I'll lay down when I'm good and ready!" she retorted, "Since you invited me here, I can sit where I want, snack when I want, go the bathroom when I want,do whatever the hell I want. Are you listening to me, Adrian?"

The detective in fact wasn't. His face had lit up like a Christmas tree. "That's it!" he exclaimed, making some obtuse hand gestures, "That's it! Sharona, you're a genius!"

"I am?" she asked, not looking directly at him.

"Yes!" he took hold of her arm and gave it a vigorous pumping, "Yes! You solved the case! We've got the…!"

His expression dropped again. "But that would have to mean…" he said slowly, looking abruptly stunned. He made a few more gestures, then rushed into the living room, where Julie's laptop had been left after she and the other children had been relocated. Wiping down the latch, he opened it—and scrubbed down the entire keyboard and mouse pad.

"What's all the shouting about?" Ambrose had reentered the apartment.

"Sharona helped me solved the case," Adrian lowered his hands over the keys, only to stop and wipe them all off again. "Unfortunately, the attack on your house happened to be a bit…"

Would you rather I check whatever you're looking for?" Ambrose asked him. Adrian nodded. "Type in Newark Central High School of New Jersey, Class of 1982," he asked his brother.

Ambrose did just that. "What are we looking for?" he asked.

"Go to the pictures section," Adrian told him, "There, that one," he pointed at one of what looked like a shop class. "Wait a minute," Ambrose frowned once he enlarged it, "I noticed all this morning and last night when I went to get some milk, this guy was parked near the corner, he was staring at the apartment with…" he gasped when he read the caption at the bottom. "Oh my God, I don't believe it!" he exclaimed, "You mean, all along…?"

Adrian nodded grimly. It was at this moment that Stottlemeyer ran into the apartment. "Great news Monk," he announced, "The Harts filed the injunction incorrectly, so it doesn't stick. We're back on the case."

"Good timing ,we just solved it," Ambrose told him.

"You solved it?" Natalie entered the apartment as well.

"Sharona solved it," Adrian told her, "Natalie, what kind of car does your family drive?"

"Oh, I guess they'd use the Lincoln if they were going on a trip down here."

"What specific brand and year?"

"Uh, I think it's a 1995 Continental, license plate JGLOWTHR."

"Captain, call the motor vehicle pool," Adrian told his boss, "Tell them we want to locate that car and get a police escort on it as soon as possible."

"Why?" the captain asked, looking befuddled.

"Because he knows," Adrian said cryptically, looking very dark, "He's known for some time now."

"What, you're saying…it was the same guy who did in Trudy that stole the waste and poisoned Clarissa and Taylor?" Stottlemeyer couldn't believe what he was hearing.

"No, but the bombings have a distinct connection," Adrian looked grim as to what that connection was supposed to be.

"I'd better call them then," Natalie looked worried. She dialed her cell phone, then sighed in disgust. "Forgot to recharge!" she grumbled, "Here, hold this Mr. Monk, I'll see if I can find the charger."

She handed the phone to Adrian. "I'll call," Stottlemeyer told her, "It's really that serious, huh Monk?"

"Exactly," the detective closed up the laptop. Ambrose reopened it and turned it off for him. "We've got to get to the Howard plant," the detective went on, "We'll catch the suspect there."

"Well Monk, we'd never get there before midnight if…chopper," Stottlemeyer snapped his fingers, "I can get a chopper for us."

A loud snoring sound came from the kitchen. "While, while you're out see if you can get about, oh, thirty-eight cups of black coffee," Adrian suggested, "Make sure they're all nice and even. We're going to need to take her with us. You've got to come too, Ambrose."

"Me?" Ambrose asked, nervous, "Outside?"

"You'll thank me later," Adrian told his brother.

"I, I don't think I can," Ambrose gulped, "I think I've done enough traveling for this year."

"That man outside would be gunning for you too, which would be very easy if you stay here," Adrian informed him. Ambrose shrugged. "Well, if my life's at stake, might as well," he reasoned.

"Anyway, get that helicopter quick, Captain," Adrian told his boss, "We'll have to hurry if we want to catch him red-handed."


	13. Case Closed, but That's Not the End

"I still think we should have called in the Emergency Response units and have the place surrounded when he comes in," Stottlemeyer said. They were hunched in the dark behind some machinery, waiting for their suspect to show up. The night watchman had been gracious enough to cooperate with them and let them in.

"If the place is surrounded by cops, nobody's going to show…could you move to your right, Ambrose? I'm feeling like you're breathing down my neck."

"I'm not," Ambrose told him, but he complied with his brother's wishes anyway.

"What is the guy coming here anyway?" Disher inquired, squinting as Adrian abruptly shone the beam of his emergency flashlight in his face. The lieutenant had been trying to coordinate evacuations on Nob Hill when Stottlemeyer had called him in, and as such he'd just barely made the helicopter to the nuclear plant.

"They want to get extra toxic waste so they'd have bargaining power in case they are caught," Adrian shone the beam on his own face, "If we catch the mastermind with it, we've got an airtight case."

"You do have the…Mr. Monk, please don't!" Natalie grimaced as he aimed it at her face next.

"He has to," came Sharona's voice from the side. The twenty-seven cups of black coffee Stottlemeyer had been able to procure for her had done a remarkable job of getting her about three-quarters sobered up, although she'd still burped and staggered from time to time. "He has to see your face in the dark."

"I see," Natalie nodded slowly, closing her eyes against the intruding flashlight. "As I was saying, Captain, you do have backup in case it gets ugly?"

"I've got ten divisions of the state National Guard just down the road in case of a firefight waiting at my command," Stottlemeyer held up his radio, "I'm hoping it doesn't come to that."

"I'm surprised you didn't bring the suits, Monk," Disher was amazed the detective was wearing no protection.

"I would have, but since it's an emergency, I had no time," Adrian admitted. There was the sound of a wheel scraping in the dark. "What are you doing now, Monk?" Stottlemeyer asked, rolling his eyes.

"The handle was off to the side, I'm putting it nice and straight at the top….too far." Steam hissed away from the valve. "I'd really appreciate it if you'd NOT give away that we're here, Monk!" the captain hissed.

"Hey, I'm dying here!" the detective hissed back, "There's puddles of lord knows what here, and I can't begin to guess how many germs are on these machines!"

"What about me? My head's spinning!" Ambrose was also a bit uncomfortable being outside of a house.

"I'm thirsty, get me another coffee," Sharona lamented. Stottlemeyer raised his hands to the heavens in rage, clearly fed up with the stakeout already. "SHUT UP!" he bellowed softly.

Everyone grew silent except for the scrubbing sound of Adrian cleaning the equipment railings. "Listen, Natalie…Adrian, not right in the eyes!…I've done some thinking since I sobered up, and maybe I've been a little hard on you," came Sharona's voice.

"A little hard?" Ambrose interceded.

"OK, a lot hard!" the coffee hadn't taken her temper away, "But, I've taken a look at myself in the mirror, and I realized that if Adrian's happier with you, I'd better accept it. You are, after all, a better detective than me."

"Hey, no problem," after gesturing for Adrian to shine the flashlight in her vicinity, Natalie extended her hand in friendship to Sharona, who shook it. "I wouldn't call yourself a bad detective," Natalie told her, "There's no way on earth I could have been able to solve the Ray Kaspo case. I don't know a thing about poisons and organ transplants and…"

"SSShhhhhhh!" Stottlemeyer hissed. The sound of footsteps now permeated the air. A shadowy figure had entered the darkened factory. It looked around, nodded once it seemed convinced it was alone, and made a beeline for the radiation suit room. The posse stood up and slowly tiptoed after it, Stottlemeyer and Disher with their weapons drawn. They slowly approached the room, listening as their subject was starting to dress up. Adrian strolled inside. "Working late, Mr. Ertley?" he asked.

The general manager jumped in shock. "Oh, uh, Detective Monk, I didn't know you were here," he said nervously, "Uh, yeah, I just wanted to check to…"

"You must be really hungry, having seven candy bars," Stottlemeyer gestured at the objects in Ertley's back pocket, "A little Christmas snack, I suppose?"

"Uh, yes, well…"

"Mind if we take a look?" the captain grabbed several "bars" before Ertley could react and tore up the wrappers. Underneath them were lead-lined vials. "Boy, you must like pretty sugary O Henrys, Ed," he remarked.

"Uh, well, I can explain, it's…"

"I'm sure you can explain, Ed, but I think I can explain it better," Adrian stepped toward him, "I figured it out when Sharona here drunkenly told me she could snack whenever she wanted. We've discovered you didn't join the last San Jose mayoral race until Emilio Almonte made his intentions to run clear. To someone with your twisted thought process, there was no way you could let someone you considered un-American to hold such a key post in your town. Once you lost, your hatred was so great that you swore revenge against him and all Mexican-Americans. So you sent out your Caucasian Provinces legions to help you build the bomb to end all bombs. And you played your part here too. Your uncle, we've found, is the head of O Henry's primary west coast distribution center in Oakland. He gives you pretty free access to his plant, he's told us. You took advantage of that; you got a hold of as many spare wrappers as you could, then fixed them around the vials like this," he produced a potholder from his coat pocket and took hold of some of the _faux_ candy bars from Ertley's pocket. "Since you eat O Henrys almost religiously, no one would suspect anything out of the ordinary if you had several bars on you. As general manager, you had security clearances to every section in the plant, so getting to the nuclear waste was no problem for you, even at night when everything was locked up tight. And with a radiation suit of your own on, who could tell it was you?"

"You'll have to speak a little clearly, detective, I understood none of that," Ertley told him.

"Let me say something a little clearer then: Louis Armani," Adrian said, "He was horrified by the extent you were willing to go to get revenge, and wanted out. He called out to Chief Richard Taylor and gave him key pieces of information about the plot. You hunted Armani down and eliminated him, but now Taylor was on to you. He had to be taken out as well. So you and John Pole, who with his degree in chemistry had been your primary assistant in building the bomb, put together a highly poisonous concoction to take him out. The police chief's convention was well publicized, and you knew no one would think that one man in a room full of dead men could have been the target of such a wide poisoning. Since Pole had done so well for you making this deadly concoction, you entrusted him with the task of giving it to the police chief convention. But Pole was up all night putting the poison together, and he misread the catering instructions out of sheer exhaustion. And so poor Clarissa Hart had to die for something she knew nothing about."

"The catering company said a man fitting Pole's description had been snooping around the building all day," Disher spoke up.

"When you realized Pole had made a mistake, you shot him in cold blood," Adrian went on, "And you resolved to kill Taylor yourself. Being such a clever planner, you had a good backup plan, and it involved Manny Nast. Like Dr. Lancaster, you decided to use his love of Santa—clearly well known by all who know him--against him. And you'd already prefabricated his house—which you specifically bought for him for the purposes of framing him for anything you might have tried—with a special safe, but I'll get to that in a moment."

"You're not getting anywhere," Ertley shouted, "I don't have to take any of this!"

"Oh yes you do," Stottlemeyer told him, "Tell him, Detective Monk."

Adrian nodded. "You scoped out Chief Taylor's house secretly over several nights," he said, "Everything was locked up tight. But you took notice that he left his milk on the table by the fireplace at night. So you devised a clever plan. I'm guessing you read Hardy Boys as a child, because the plot's taken directly from there."

"Book number eleven, 'While the Clock Ticked,'" Ambrose cited it directly.

"Thank you, Ambrose," Adrian told his brother. Turning back to Ertley, he said, "You put on your Santa suit and climbed onto the roof just after dark and waited for Taylor to come home. In the meantime, you assembled a clever little device, helped in part by some of the items your followers had stolen from Edwards Air Force Base."

Disher held up a bag containing a small metallic device with lots of gears and lights. He then held up a bag containing the jaws Natalie had discovered. He then held the two bags together. They matched up perfectly. "You put the poison in a special vial that was held in the jaws here and lowered it down the chimney," Adrian told him, "You had a special camera attached to the mechanism here so you could watch your package being delivered. Once it was in place, you pressed the button here," he pointed to the button in question on the device, "And the poison was released into Chief Taylor's milk. Once you got this thing back up the chimney. All you had to do was sit back and listen to him die. Then came your chance to frame Manny for your deeds."

"You've been hanging around this plant too long, Detective; you haven't said a legitimate thing yet!" Ertley told him curtly.

"I think I have," Adrian said with rare self-confidence, "You knew no one would believe Manny if he brought it up to the authorities that he'd seen Santa. He was your perfect fall guy. You waited until he was asleep, then you crept into his house. Since you'd had it prefabricated, you had the key to the front door, that's why there was no sign of anyone having broken into the house—we did a fly-over just before we came here so I could check to be sure. You chloroformed Manny, put then some of your spare vials in his hands so his fingerprints would be on them. Then it was time to activate the safe—your safe. You'd had it installed as a double safe, actually. Manny only saw the part with his own money in it, but he didn't know that behind it was a second, lead-lined compartment with some of the toxic waste you'd stolen. One of the things I'd spotted on the fly-over was the false siding that concealed the back of the safe. You dropped the vials you'd had Manny hold in there. Then you opened up the hidden handles on the front part of the safe and dragged it out of the wall. The safe with the waste clicked into place up front; with the back paneling preserved, no one could tell the difference. Then you dragged the safe with Manny's money out the front door and left him to take the rap."

"Nice, Detective Monk, very nice, but unfortunately you have no proof," Ertley told him smarmily.

"Oh we've got proof all right, Ed," Stottlemeyer spoke up, "I ordered a search warrant on your place; they not only found this Hardy Boy device here, but also Mr. Nast's safe, bomb parts, more radioactive containers, and your Caucasian Provinces membership card. You're going down, Eddie."

Ertley became abruptly defensive and arrogant. "I had a feeling you'd fail to see my point of view, Captain," he said darkly, "Too many Americans have grown blind to the epidemic of foreigners taking over our country and stealing us blind of our jobs and livelihoods! What I'm about to perform tonight is a civil service. When all three bombs detonate, there'll be…."

"THREE bombs?" Stottlemeyer went ghostly white, "You made THREE bombs?"

"That's right, stupid!" Ertley told him, "The devastation will cleanse us of these despicable minorities and make the West Coast safe again for decent Americans like…"

Stottlemeyer put his hand over Ertley's mouth and shoved him against the wall. "You," the captain thundered as he handcuffed him, "are NOT a decent American! Nor is anyone else who believes in your sick, twisted ideology! But one thing you ARE going to do is tell us where those bombs are right now!"

"If you think I'm going to tell you anything, you're even stupider than you look," Ertley told him, "I've trained my followers well not to say anything to the authorities. And if you try and force anything out of me, I'll claim police brutality, and you'll lose your badge and end up in jail."

"I don't care!" Stottlemeyer grabbed him by the collar, "You've got nobody here to back you up, Eddie; you're going to talk!"

"GRENADE!" Disher cried out. One landed right near them. They scattered just before it blew up. "Oh, almost forgot," Ertley said coolly, "I'm not alone. 'The Goblin' decided to come along tonight. He was hoping you'd show up."

A wave of machine gun fire strafed their feet. One shot blew the radio out of the captain's hand and short-circuited it just as Cargill's voice came through saying, "Captain, we've found the Davenport's car near the 5/80 interchange, it's…" A man in a black leather jacket with an admittedly tacky Green Goblin mask over his head ran down the nearby staircase at them, firing homicidally. "Stay down!" he ordered in a falsely deep voice, "Throw your weapons over to me!"

"I don't think we're going to do that," Adrian stood up with unexpected defiance, "Incidentally, there's no need to disguise yourself anymore, Trevor."


	14. The Revenge of Trevor Fleming

AUTHOR'S NOTE: For a full explanation as to why we've come to this, it maybe be helpful to read my previous story "Due Monk," or if you're in a time crunch, just the last chapter.

From the first time he'd first learned about Trevor, Adrian had greatly disliked him. Marriage, the detective adamantly believed, was a sacred union between two people meant to be upheld by both members of the union for all eternity. Thus, although he'd never approved of any crime in any fashion, he had felt a small sense of satisfaction to discover that Trevor had not only been cheating on Sharona again, but that he'd made an arrangement with the mob to have her killed off to cover it up. One of the few things in his life Adrian took genuine pride in was chasing Trevor down after he had exposed him and bringing him in, even though Trevor had a severe cold at the time. His testimony at the trial had landed the man a prison term long enough to make many felons shiver.

Yet here Trevor was now, and as he removed the Green Goblin mask, the detective could see the same burning hatred in his eyes that he'd observed as the bailiff had lead him out of the courtroom after sentencing. "Hello Monk," his enemy said darkly, "Didn't expect to see me again, did you?"

Well, well, the rats keep coming back no matter how hard you try to exterminate them," Disher said contemptuously.

"Shut your cakehole, rookie!" Trevor fired a shot dangerously close to Disher's leg. There were footsteps as another figure emerged from the darkness. "Hello Natalie," said…

"Mitch?" Natalie gasped at the sight of the man, "No! It can't…how…?"

"No, it's not Mitch," Adrian said. His heart sank when he saw the newcomer looked guilt-ridden. The worst-case scenario had happened. "This is a clever imposter who happens to be named…"

"Peter Hague, a.k.a. 'Black Pete,'" Stottlemeyer recognized him up front, "You're wanted for murdering a young black woman in New York; one of the most gruesome killings even in that city."

"Pete's initiation rite," Ertley said with a sick sense of pride in his voice, "He passed with flying colors."

"But why?" Natalie looked heartbroken that her husband wasn't really back, "Why make me believe it was Mitch?"

"Because Trevor was intent on breaking your heart," Adrian said in a low voice, "This was going to be his revenge against you. Right now on my answering machine, there's a message for you asking you to join 'Mitch' at Fisherman's Wharf. Several Caucasian Provinces members are waiting there to kill you at the moment."

"Very clever Monk," Trevor snarled, "Too bad it's the last bit of smart business you'll ever do! Oh no you don't!" he snapped at Disher, who'd been going for his gun, "You and your life partner," he gestured at Stottlemeyer, "Better lose those right now!"

"And what if we don't, Trevor?" Stottlemeyer challenged him.

"Oh you don't want to do that, captain, or I'll press button number six," Trevor pulled out a cell phone, "And send Benjy and the girl out in a literal blaze of glory!"

"Oh my God!" Natalie had turned about as pale as a person possibly could, "What did you do to my family, you monster? WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH MY BABY?"

She lunged at Trevor, who rather violently pistol-whipped her across the face. Natalie collapsed to the floor, blood gushing from the strike point. "Any other takers?" Trevor dared the rest of the group, who stood stone still. "Good, now lose the guns!" he ordered the cops. They reluctantly tossed them aside. "Now take the cuffs off him," Trevor gestured to Ertley.

"He's a terrorist, Trevor!" Stottlemeyer protested, "He's going to blow up the city!"

"That's not my concern!" Trevor snapped, "I'm warning you captain, I'll kill them now!"

He put his finger over the 6 button. Glowering darkly, Stottlemeyer unlocked Ertley's cuffs. "It's was nice doing business with you, captain," Ertley told him with an air of superiority.

"And once your blast goes off, the papers will all blame him because he failed to bring in the guilty parties when he had the chance," Trevor sneered at the humbled Stottlemeyer, "His reputation will be ruined permanently, and he'll be remembered by history as the man who let San Francisco get destroyed. All right, go take off and do whatever you wanted to do."

Ertley walked calmly into the radiation suit room. Trevor cocked his rifle again. "All right, all of you start walking!" he ordered the group, "Keep your hands where I can see them!"

He forced them up the hall, leaving Natalie lying on the floor twitching. "Black Pete" stayed behind, watching his back. "If you've hurt even one hair on my sons' backs…!" Stottlemeyer muttered dangerously under his breath.

"Your sons are fine, captain," Trevor told him, "My grudge with you doesn't extent that deep."

"So you're willing to go this far?" Sharona spoke up for the first time since Trevor had made his presence known. She fixed him with a look that mixed rage and terror. "You'd conspire with these people to try and kill us off…you'd endanger the life of your son—your only son—even though he told you at the trial he forgave you for everything you did in Chicago?"

"Oh that's news. I thought he was YOUR son now?" Trevor growled. Without warning, and to the disgust of all, he gave her a brutal kick to the chest. "For your information," he barked as she doubled over in agony, "I don't like these people's sick, twisted views any more than you do. They're the scum of the earth. But at least they're willing to give me comfort and the opportunity to speak my views, unlike _some_ people I know! And if I heard correctly, you promised Benjy he could come visit me. Six months, and not even a word! I waited and waited. The thought of seeing him again kept me going even after I was ganged raped TWICE by the other animals in that hellhole! Look at this," he pulled down his sleeve and showed her an ugly scar, "One of them slashed me with a machete! That's what I've gone through!"

"We were going to stop by after Christ—" Sharona tried to protest, but Trevor backhanded her across the face. "I'm sick of your lies!" he shouted at his once again ex-wife, utter hate seething from his every word, "You lied on that stand to send me away for the rest of my life because you didn't want me to see my son again! And you call ME vengeful? Well now the tables have turned, hag, and if I can't have Benjy," he shoved the cell phone in her face, "then no one will."

"There's no need to bring Julie into this as well," Ambrose interceded.

"Oh, the more retarded brother," Trevor greeted him with outright contempt as well, "Well, the girl's mother has to pay for getting involved with your brother here, and this is the best way I can think of. All the birds killed with one stone, so to speak."

"How lovely," Adrian commented, "A coward to the end, hiding behind white supremacists, just like you hid behind the mob in Chicago. Old habits die hard, right Trevor?"

"By the way, I've got a Christmas present for you, Monk," Trevor pushed him against the wall and decked the detective hard in the face, much as Adrian had done to him on the airplane. "What goes around comes around!" the fugitive snapped pushing him to the ground, "You ruined my life, Monk, and now I'm going to ruin yours, and the lives of everyone you care for!"

"Oh really?" Disher grumbled, putting a brave face to the situation, "Monk, when did you figure out it was him?"

"I thought about who would know where we all lived," Adrian hauled himself to his feet, "And only one person would know that. I'm guessing when Trevor faxed Natalie's social security card to Commissioner Brooks in his attempt to get us off the kidnapping in Chicago, he got back every conceivable bit of information on her family. He printed out a copy and memorized it in case he needed it if Julie's abduction didn't get to us. This included a detailed sketch of Mitch, whom he realized looked a lot like his old friend Black Pete Hague, who we knew lived here in San Francisco now."

"Then how'd he get here?" Stottlemeyer had to ask, "With all the press coverage his trial got, people would have noticed if he was on the loose."

"My cousin," Trevor told him, "was very kind to agree to take my place when he paid me a visit. He altered his appearance to look like me, and then tunneled in underneath my cell. As far as the guards at Joliet know, I'm still there."

"At first you were just bent on eliminating Natalie and I," Adrian continued his second summation of the evening, "After getting Black Pete's consent to pretend to be Mitch, you called my apartment pretending to be Ambrose, then rigged the bomb in his house, hoping I would come over and be caught in it. You waited around the corner for me to arrive, which came too late for your plan, but you saw Sharona with us and immediately decided to ratchet your revenge plan up to full steam. You obtained the support of the rest of Caucasian Provinces, and gave them our addresses to bomb. Then you tried one more time to bump us off by yourself at the precinct. You didn't want to risk a third strike after that failed, but you kept watching us, waiting for an advantage to exploit. When you saw the children being evacuated, you saw that opportunity, and you gave Ertley's men the go-ahead to snatch Benjy and Julie."

They'd reached one of the dumping chambers for the plant's toxic waste. Trevor threw open the door. "Get in!" he yelled at the men, "We're going to heat things up really good tonight!"

"Are you out of your mind?" Ambrose protested.

"He could well be," Adrian told him, "Men with nothing to lose are usually out of their minds."

"But unlike them, revenge _will_ be mine, Monk," Trevor told him. He shoved Sharona up against the railing. "Even BREATHE, and 'your' son dies now!" he warned her, holding the cell phone in her face for added effect. Quivering visibly, Sharona froze up. The men reluctantly entered the chamber. Adrian, however, stood firm for once. "If you intend for this to be the end, Trevor, you might as well bring out the one secret you somehow did keep from Sharona all these years," he said firmly.

"I don't know what you're talking about, Monk," Trevor said dismissively.

"You didn't for the longest time, did you?" anger rose in Adrian's voice, "The day Trudy died, there was another bomb that went off in the city. A security camera on the bank up the street caught a picture of a man running away from the scene. A man…" he unfolded a newspaper clipping from his pocket and held it up for everyone to see, "…who on closer inspection looks an awful lot like you."

Dead silence filled the room. "You know, it's not enough, is it Monk?" Trevor mumbled nervously, "It's bad enough you destroyed my life, now you're saying I ruined yours! Give me one good reason I would have helped kill your wife!"

"Perhaps you were helping out an old friend?" Adrian countered, "This afternoon, I came across a class picture of the 1982 shop class at Newark Central High School. You were a freshman that year. In the picture, you're standing with your class partner for the year, a senior who'd been chosen by his classmates as the most likely to succeed. I called your teacher on the way over, and he told me the two of you were quite close in his class. That boy's name, in case you've forgotten, was Warrick Tennyson."

"GET IN THE DAMN CHAMBER, MONK!" heavy guilt was sweeping Trevor's face. The fugitive in a quick flashed tossed the detective into the chamber, then leaned down and coughed in his face. Adrian shriveled up in horror. "I'M the coward, Monk?" Trevor mocked him, "Well, to each his own, and now you're going to join your wife."

Footsteps echoed up the hall. "Are you almost done?" Ertley sounded impatient, "The chopped to Rio leaves in an hour."

"Yeah, just give me a minute to lock them up," Trevor told him. Ertley stuck his head in the chamber door. "Well boys, we part company here," he said dangerously, "By the way, one bomb's on the Coit Tower, and another's disguised as a fruit cart in Chinatown. But in the unlikely event you manage to get out of this, I'm not going to tell you where we put the biggest bomb."

"Why are you even telling them this?" Trevor argued with him, "This is Adrian Monk! He could figure out any damn clue!"

"Not here and now," Ertley slammed the door shut. "Come on, let us out of here!" Stottlemeyer raged, pounding on the door. Something heavy was pushed up against it to block their way out. Fast-moving footsteps charged toward them in the hall. "I'll kill you, you filthy son of a…!" Natalie was screeching hysterically.

The sound of a harsh blow being struck cut off her tirade. "By the way, your daughter's a piece of trash, just like you!" Trevor could be heard saying cruelly over the sound of her groaning in pain, "And as for YOU, I've got my own special gift for…!"

The rest of his threat, as well as all outside noises, were cut off by the sound of the equipment starting up. "Oh you've got to be kidding me!" Stottlemeyer roared, staring at the duct on the wall through which the radioactive waste would soon be pouring.

"I'm afraid not, captain!" Adrian took gasping, shallow breaths. His claustrophobia was starting to kick in. He reeled around the chamber, his head spinning. "They intend to radiate us to death."

"How long do we have, Monk?" Disher asked nervously.

Adrian was too busy hyperventilating to answer. "Hmm," Ambrose glanced at the duct, "This seems to be a Mark III model, there's about fifty gallons of waste on the other end, it's going to take about five minutes for the equipment to come to full power, waste flows about three yards a second, shaft appears to be five thousand four hundred sixty-three feet long, I'd say about, oh, nine minute and twenty-nine seconds before we're all eleven feet tall and glowing like LEDs."

"And no way to call outside," Stottlemeyer realized his radio had been destroyed.

"I know," Adrian stumbled over to him, gasping almost comically for air, "And that's a time lock on the door; it won't open for another twelve hours. Can I have your notebook there, captain? I need to write my will."


	15. Two Monks to the Rescue

"…and to my beloved in-laws, Dwight and Marsha Ellison, I leave all pictures of their daughter Trudy, as well of all of her poems, published and unpublished, for their…"

"Will you cut that out, Monk?" yelled Stottlemeyer. The captain launched himself against the door for what had to be the ninth time since they'd been locked in the chamber. The result was the same as all the previous attempts; he stumbled backwards, clutching his shoulder in agony. "I think we've established that's not going to break it open," Ambrose quipped.

"Well I'm certainly open to any suggestions," Stottlemeyer told him.

"I've got it," Disher spoke up, "We take a pen, and we squeeze the ink into the time lock. That should advance it to the time it's supposed to open."

Stottlemeyer stared incredulously at his adjutant. "I don't think I want to know where you got that from, Randy," he said sarcastically.

"Well, I saw it work on an episode of Get Smart, and…" Disher stated.

"GET SMART?" the captain was thoroughly appalled, "GET SMART?"

"Well, it could work," Disher defended his viewpoint, "I mean, I did see a guy with a banana phone the other day near the Presidio."

Stottlemeyer let out a howl and pounded his head off the wall in frustration. "Don't yell!" Adrian shouted at him, "You're using up the available air!"

He staggered around the chamber, gasping desperately even though there was still plenty of air in the chamber. "Can't breathe!" he lamented almost laughably, "Walls are closing in!"

"Equipment's almost up to full speed," Ambrose noted an increase in the sounds of machinery churning up the duct, "We're down to about four minutes."

"Can't last that long!" Adrian grabbed his brother's vest, "Tell Mom I love her."

"Uh, Mom's dead already, and I'm probably going to be dead too," Ambrose pointed out to him.

"If only he hadn't blasted the radio," Stottlemeyer groaned, "Then we could call for backup to get us out of here. Now we're stuck with no line outside."

"How about smoke signals?" Disher suggested. Stottlemeyer completed ignored him. "With what?" Ambrose took up the line of questioning, "Even toxic waste won't burn that way, and there's no…"

"Wait a minute; Monk, Natalie gave you her cell!" Stottlemeyer realized.

"She said the batteries were nearly dead," Adrian stumbled toward his boss, "Hold me up; I can't stay afloat any longer!"

Stottlemeyer reached into Adrian's pocket and extracted the cell phone. "Downey?" he yelled into it after he dialed his quick response unit, "Move in now; we're about to be irradiated here!"

"Can't swim; drowning!" Adrian swooned in the captain's arms. Stottlemeyer pushed him aside. "We're in the chamber in the far end of the plant; get here quick!" he told his men.

"Bad news, the waste is going to get dumped in about a minute," Ambrose informed them. Disher ran over to the duct and pressed it shut. "That's not going to keep it out, lieutenant," the instruction manual writer informed him.

"EEEYYYAAAAAHHH! EEEEYYYAAAAAAAHHHH!" Adrian reeled around the chamber gasping crazily for oxygen. "Monk, please, get a grip!" Stottlemeyer ordered him.

"Too late, too many of us in here, can't stay afloat!" Adrian grabbed on to Disher's sleeve and hyperventilated all over him. Disher stared at him in bewilderment. "Water's closing in; walls too!" the detective moaned.

"Get me out of here now!" Stottlemeyer pounded on the door again, unable to take much more.

"Here comes the waste now, they've got about ninety seconds," Ambrose said as the sound of rushing liquid started coming down the shaft toward them.

Fortunately, it was at that moment that the sound of footsteps thundering toward the chamber roared up outside. There was a knock on the door. "Captain, are you in there?" someone shouted.

"Yes, break the door open!" he ordered. There was a thumping against the door. "It's locked tight," the officer stated the obvious.

"Shoot the damn lock off!" Stottlemeyer yelled at them.

"You can't shoot that type of time lock," Ambrose informed him, "You'll just ricochet the bullets."

"All right, then blow it off!" the captain ordered.

"Stand clear, sir," the officer told him. There was the sound of something being set into place. The nuclear waste was inching ever closer toward them in the duct; it would be there in seconds.

"Fire in the hole!" came the shout, followed by a muffled blast. Stottlemeyer shoved the door open and charged outside, followed quickly by the others. Disher slammed it shut again just as the slopping sounds of the waste splatting on the floor filled the air. Adrian stumbled over to the nearest officer. "Are you all right, Detective Monk?" the man asked him.

"What year is it?" the detective asked between deep, exaggerated breaths.

"Get that paramedic over here once he's done working on the women, see if Detective Monk sustained any damage," the officer instructed the medical crew by the railing.

"Oh no!" Adrian grimaced heavily at the sight before him there. He could tell that Trevor had savagely beaten both women while they were locked in the chamber, and that he'd choked Sharona as well. The detective cautiously walked over to where the medical crew was treating them. "I, uh, I guess it didn't go too well without us?" he asked, hoping this wouldn't set off a tirade.

"He said I had to be punished for working with you!" Natalie sobbed hysterically, her tears mixing with the blood on her face, "He told me I was less than human to consult you, I can't believe he called me a sub-human! He called me the w-word too! And now he's going to kill my baby! I can't live without her; she's all that keeps me going!"

"I couldn't breathe!" Sharona was, if it was possible, even more distraught. She set upon her former employee eyes that had just seen the very worst side of humanity, "And I looked at him pleading him to stop, trying to tap into the man I once loved, trying to get him to listen to reason! But the man I loved wasn't there. All I saw in those eyes was burning, repressed hatred! Hatred for me, and everything I've tried to believe in! Oh God Adrian, it's all my fault!"

"Your fault?" Adrian frowned as she broke down into uncontrollable tears, "No, no it's not your fault, Sharona, it's not your fault at all!"

"Yes it is!" she cried, "I told him everything: your addresses, your ticks, everything you're afraid of: I told him everything when I thought I could trust him! I gave him the keys to destroying our lives without even thinking he'd become the monstrous animal he is now! Why couldn't I have just stayed away when I had the chance?"

"Hey," without realizing what he was doing, Adrian pulled her and Natalie close into a hug, "hey, you can't blame yourself for that. You had no way of knowing he'd turn into a vicious, animalistic, murderous sociopath. He made the choice to do the things he's done. You're a good woman, Sharona Fleming, and you're not the trash he says you are."

"Adrian," she pulled back and stared at him quizzically, "You're being sympathetic. You're being honestly sympathetic. Are you sure you weren't irradiated?"

"No," a rare iron resolve was permeating his voice, "And don't the two of you worry; he's not going to kill Julie and Benjy on my watch, no sirree."

"Yep, he was definitely irradiated," Natalie asided to Sharona.

"Well, there's just one problem there," Ambrose couldn't have helped eavesdropping, "We don't know where he's got them, or how much he's got to protect himself. If he knows all your weaknesses, he will exploit them."

"Hmm," Adrian thought carefully over what he'd seen and heard over the last half hour, "From what he and Ertley said, it's clear they're hitching a ride to Brazil together, so it's likely they've got the kids at the site they're taking off from. The only thing would be where would they catch a helicopter without…?"

And then it hit him. "Trevor was wearing a Green Goblin mask; he called himself 'The Goblin' throughout this whole thing," he realized, "And the Green Goblin's final act of vengeance before he died—or at least before they retconned it so he didn't die—was…"

"…throwing Gwen Stacy off the George Washington Bridge," Ambrose had picked up on his brother's train of thought. "The Golden Gate," the instruction manual writer surmised, "That would be a nice symbolic place to plant your biggest bomb, being the most visible part of San Francisco." A look of terror crossed his face as he realized exactly what Trevor had in mind for Julie and his own son, "A fall from that height, hitting the water'll be like hitting a brick wall," he realized, "There's no way they'd survive the impact."

"Well then, we haven't got a moment to lose," Adrian sprung to his feet with uncommon courage.

"Not even to clean up the blood you've got on your shoulders?" Ambrose pointed the patches of blood out. Adrian took one look at them and started shrieking in horror. "Oh this is going to go real well," Sharona grumbled.

"Have you got anything Monk?" Stottlemeyer walked over to find his best men hyperventilating again.

"It's the Golden Gate, they've got the last bomb on the bridge," Ambrose told him, "They're going to throw the kids off it before they escape."

"Dear God," Stottlemeyer went white yet again, "A blast on the Golden Gate, that would send up a cloud of radiation all the way to San Diego."

"Captain," Disher ran over, "This was in Ertley's filing cabinet. It seems to be a list of all Caucasian Provinces members in the San Francisco County area."

His boss took the list off him and nodded as he read it. "OK people, listen up," he instructed all the law enforcement personnel milling around, "We've got our suspects right here. Once we print out copies of this, find these people, and lock them up good and tight! Here's how it's going to go: Lieutenant, you take bomb on Telegraph Hill, and I'll take the one in Chinatown personally. The rest of you that aren't helping with evacuations, get to the Golden Gate Bridge; you'll find the last bomb, as well as our mastermind, Mr. Edward James Ertley, right there. Along with him, you'll find a certain notorious fugitive, Mr. Trevor Benjamin Fleming, waiting for a helicopter. DO NOT let them take off under any circumstances! Monk, I want…Monk?"

The detective was in fact already long gone. He pushed open the door to the plant and stared around the yard, looking for an open vehicle to take to the bridge.

"Over here," Ambrose called to him. His brother was halfway inside a police tank near the gate. "Are you sure?" Adrian frowned, "I mean,…"

"If he was Tennyson's backup, then this is personal for me like it is for you," Ambrose said with his own rare sense of resolve. Adrian shrugged and climbed up into the tank. "No don't close the hatch!" he protested as Ambrose reached for it, "It would be…safer with it open."

"OK, now how do you start this thing?" Ambrose eyed over the controls as his brother wiped each and every one of them down, "I know I read about starting tanks somewhere before and…oh yeah, it's this one."

He pulled the throttle in question. The tank roared to life. "All right, let's do it," Adrian said enthusiastically…

…only then realizing that Ambrose had never driven ANYTHING before in his life. The tank lurched out of its spot, then abruptly braked to a halt. Then started up again. Then stopped again. Then started up again. Then stopped again. "You, you may want to go a little faster, we are down to only twenty-five minutes or so," Adrian pressed his brother.

"They should have labeled these levers; I think this one takes the brake off," Ambrose pulled it. The brake did come off, but the result was that the tank started spinning in circles, sending front-line police that had been exiting the plant scattering. The tank's battering ram shattered the windows of cruisers unlucky enough to be parked near it. "AMBROSE!" Adrian yelled, hanging onto the roof for dear life. The hatch abruptly slammed down on his fingers. He yelping in pain and pulled them in.

"Ah, it's this one," Ambrose pulled another lever, which finally restored equilibrium to the tank. He floored it, and their vehicle lumbered toward—and ultimately through--the main gate. "Now all we have to do is find the 101," he commented as they roared up the street, "and we'll be going right to the bridge. With everyone leaving the city, traffic'll be light."

"Lucky for the other motorists…a stop sign is not a suggestion!" Adrian protested as the tank blew through one. "You're on the wrong side of the road!" he screamed.

"This thing doesn't seem to have any lateral control," Ambrose pulled a couple more levers, none of which seemed to serve any real purpose. They were now going down a steep hill. "Brakes, brakes, brakes!" Adrian warned him.

"I'm trying the brakes," Ambrose pulled the two levers he'd decided were the brakes, "I think Isaac Newton's driving this thing right now."

"Why couldn't we have just picked up a normal car like—milk truck!" Adrian shouted his warning just in time. Ambrose turned what was now obviously the steering column to the right, just narrowly avoiding the collision with the milk truck. He did, however, collide with the front display of a department store, completely demolishing it. He then took out three consecutive streetlights before he was able to get back into traffic, just barely missing a bus bench on which two old men reading a newspaper. "Was that the Number Seventeen?" one of them asked without looking up.

"Nope," his associate said, "Just an out of control police tank."

"Oh," the first old timer nodded and buried his head in the paper.

"Parade, there's a parade up there!" Adrian pointed to a Christmas parade coming right at them.

"I see the parade," Ambrose squinted through the slit at the front of the tank, "I don't think this is supposed to be on this route."

"Neither are we; turn!" Adrian shouted. Ambrose turned as best he could, but it wasn't enough to keep from sideswiping the first two floats. "Official police business, sorry about that folks!" the instruction manual writer yelled to the parade members fleeing from him.

"You think they care?" Adrian felt like he was going to pass out if another crisis arose. "Wait, wait, stop the tank."

Ambrose somehow ground it to a halt. "What?" he asked his brother, who was already climbing out the hatch.

"The one light on that angel there, it's out," Adrian pointed to the decoration on the nearest streetlight. The detective squirmed as far up the pole as he would dare—only about two feet—and turned the light until it lit back up. "There, that's better," he said.

"That's not," Ambrose pointed behind them. Legions of angry townspeople were charging after them. Before Adrian knew it, Ambrose had started the tank and was taking off again. "Hey, Ambrose, wait for me!" he cried, running as hard as he could to keep up with the tank. He grabbed onto the rear bumper and held on for dear life as he was dragged into a hard left turn. Once everything was straightened out, he swung his back legs up onto the rear of the tank, only to find himself freaking out again as a snowball thrown by one of the townspeople landed on his shoulder. He slipped and almost lost his balance, but miraculously managed to hang on. "Here, the 101 freeway, turn," he instructed Ambrose, who did just that. Adrian slowly managed to crawl back into the tank, although he kept his upper body safely outside the claustrophobic interior of the vehicle. "Let me navigate," his told his brother, "I've got a good clear view up here, as long as no airborne germs try to single me out, so speed her up—but not that fast!" he protested as Ambrose zoomed to almost a hundred miles an hour. The tank yawned all over the deserted highway, slamming into the median barrier and guardrail as if it were a pinball. "Could you at least TRY to drive in a straight line?" Adrian berated Ambrose, perhaps a bit unfairly.

"I'm working on it, I'm working on it," Ambrose threw several more levers, also to no effect, "The good news is, we're on a direct line with the bridge now."

"And the other drivers will be laughing at us all the way there," Adrian couldn't help noticing the drivers leaving the San Francisco metro area honking their horns and laughing at them as they sped comically by.

The next thing the detective knew, the tank abruptly turned a hundred and eighty degrees, leaving him staring backwards at the highway they'd just driven over. "Ambrose, what in God's name are you doing now?" he shrieked.

"I, uh, guess I threw a wrong switch in here," Ambrose admitted.

"Then reverse it!"

"I can't," Ambrose held his hand up through the hatch. The lever in question had broken off in it. Adrian put his hand over his face. "Get the lilacs ready, Trudy, we're probably joining you tonight after all!" he shouted up at the heavens.

"I can't see now, Adrian, you'll have to be my eyes," Ambrose informed him.

"Road construction coming up, get in the left lane…no Ambrose, your OTHER left!" Adrian cried out. The tank smashed into the work zone, knocking over a highway truck parked too close to them. With traffic down to one lane, it didn't have the freedom to drift as much now, and as such sent dozens of air barriers flying through the air. "I always did want to do that," one of the astonished workers admitted to an associate as he watched them fly to the sides.

The tank hit a patch of severely road roads. The jolt sent Adrian flying backwards, where he landed very hard on the battering ram. His lips pursed from the intense pain in his groin. But it was only the beginning. A wide swerve to the right sent him reeling off the ram, which he just managed to grab on to in time. "Would you stop blocking the view?" Ambrose argued from the slit inside the tank.

"Very funny, very funny!" Adrian had to run fast to avoid losing his grip.

"You don't happen to see if there's a turn coming up, do you?" Ambrose inquired.

"No, but you're about to hit a…" Adrian's plea came too late, followed by a loud crash. "Sign bridge," he sighed, watching it collapse to the freeway behind him.

For an agonizing ten miles, the detective was forced to basically run for his life. Finally, he was able to swing himself up onto the battering ram and slowly inched back to "dry land." Ambrose had now climbed partially up to out of the tank to watch where he was going. "Well, at least you're getting a good exercise," he said, making a weak attempt at humor. He was sweating heavily, not at all used to being out on the road.

"Indeed," Adrian wiped his brow, "Well, at least now I know what things looked like on the Texas when they chased after the General during Andrews's Raid."

"My thoughts exactly, it's like…"

"Traffic's merging, traffic's merging, watch the starboard side!" Adrian pointed. They'd made even better time than he'd expected, and were now merging with Route 1, which was not nearly as deserted as the 101 had been. Ambrose had to swerve quickly to avoid hitting cars. "Hey, watch where you're going, you lousy drunken cop!" one irate driver yelled at them as they destroyed a sign reading GOLDEN GATE BRIDGE ½ MILE: PREPARE TO STOP AND PAY TOLL. "Get in the E-Z Pass lane," Adrian instructed his brother, "That'll be quicker. See if you can make them out up there on the bridge's infrastructure."

'Shouldn't that be your job?" Ambrose asked him.

"Well I figured since you're facing front…slow down!" Adrian once again freaked out as they approached the bridge's toll barrier. As fate would have unluckily had it, the tank was hurtling for the one that had the most cars lined up. Ambrose yanked the brake levers—which immediately broke in his hands like the lever that had turned them backwards had. "Uh, I think you're going to have to hit the deck, Adrian," he warned his brother, holding up the broken levers. Adrian groaned. "Why does every attempt to hunt Trevor down have to involve a chase and crash?" he thought out loud dismally. The tank drifted to the right just in time to avoid hitting innocent motorists, although it did obliterate the tollbooth in the next lane, which caused the roof to collapse over several mercifully empty lanes on either side. Moments later, the tank drifted off the road and mercifully crashed into one of the ascending cables, just a few feet from tipping over into the bay. Adrian shook himself off and dragged Ambrose out of the now smoking tank onto the bridge's walkway. They're up there," Ambrose pointed up at the far tower. People were definitely moving around up there—and helicopters were circling at a distance.

"Great," Adrian groaned, realizing he had a big climb high above the bay ahead of himself, "As if crashing isn't enough, why does Trevor always set these showdowns up way up in the air?"

"So what does that mean for you?" Ambrose looked at him strangely.

"Nothing," Adrian straightened his lapels, "Except that I'm going to have to put in overtime on this one. Cover my back, Ambrose. If any more of these white supremacist guys tries and ambush me, yell up a warning or something."

"Great, great," Ambrose nodded without much commitment, "Now I've got to go get a roof over my head again, just to get back in the rhythm, you know."

"Right, right," Adrian would have preferred under the circumstances he wouldn't, but he knew better than to fight Ambrose over something like this. He watched his brother trot off for the temporary safety of a tollbooth, then ran for the far tower. It looked even higher than ever now, but he knew he had to get up there if he wanted to stop Ertley and Trevor before they committed more murder.


	16. The Amazing SpiderMonk

Ever so slowly, Adrian made his way up the northbound right side bridge cable, a wipe in each hand as he gripped the railings tighter than one could imagine. His eyes were by and large shut, and he felt like passing out again. But he forced himself to keep going. He wasn't going to let anything happen to the kids on his watch.

After a five-minute climb, he felt reasonably calmed to open his left eye a tad. He had somehow made it two-thirds of the way up. There were three people atop the tower, pacing back and forth. Attached to the other side, he noticed ominously, was a small metallic cage, and there was definitely someone inside it—as well as C4 holding it to the superstructure.

The helicopters were circling far enough away from the bridge that he could now make out some of the conversation going on. "…real, real good," Ertley could be heard muttering out loud, "Where the hell's my chopper? They're three minutes behind schedule. I need to be at least five miles away to avoid being radiated by this blast."

"Well, since we'll be splitting up in Sao Paulo, let me get right to the chase, Ertley, you owe me five hundred grand," Trevor told him.

"What do I look like, the federal reserve?" Ertley said, irritated, "You'll get paid when we touch down in Brazil, Fleming."

"You wouldn't happen to be thinking of double-crossing me, would you Ertley?" Trevor sounded like he didn't trust the white supremacist at all.

"No, of course not, a deal's a deal, I told you that myself," Adrian could tell Ertley was lying, even though he had his eyes shut again. The wind was blowing hard off the bay, leaving the detective feeling like he'd be blown off the structure if it got any stronger. He gripped the railings even tighter and forced himself forward.

"I hope you realize you're not going to get away with this," came Julie's voice from the cage. She was doing her best to sound brave, but Adrian could sense the terror she was feeling.

"Oh really, sugarpot?" Ertley sneered, "Well, your guardian angel Detective Monk was the only one who could prove that, and right now he's baking like a clam. Meanwhile, any blast this big (Adrian could now here even the more ominous sound of a bomb ticking away) is going to get blamed on the Arabs by the stupid, pathetic populace. While we bomb their cities into dust in retaliation, I'll be safely soaking up the sun on the Copacabana knowing I've done my country a great favor by ridding it of unworthys. So if I were you, I'd shut my mouth and enjoy the last few minutes of your life."

He gave the cage a contemptuous kick. Having inched further to the top, Adrian now took disgusted note that both Julie and Benjy had been fitted with explosive vests that could have been detonated by remote. He also could now hear the rhythm of the nuclear bomb. From what he could ascertain, there was at least fifteen pounds of spent toxic waste loaded into the bomb, and it was going to blow in six minutes and twenty-four seconds.

"Are we sure we have to kill them?" came a quiet, upset voice from the other corner of the tower. Adrian could sense that "Black Pete" had personally stopped the Davenport's car on the interstate, and was already regretting it.

"We have no choice," Trevor said impatiently, "We've come too far for this."

"YOU'VE come too far for this!" Pete hissed, "You told me you were framed by your wife, Trevor! You told me Detective Monk had fabricated evidence against you! You said nothing about killing innocent kids!"

"Are you chickening out?" Ertley clearly had no qualms about killing innocent kids, "That wouldn't be very healthy, you know."

"Ed, are you really this insane?" Pete protested, "They're not even teenagers! I would never have agreed to do this if the two of you have told me about this…!"

"All right, that's it," Ertley drew a semi-automatic from his pocket. Adrian shut his eyes again, not willing to witness firsthand the shot that rang out. A low groan, followed by Julie shrieking, "DADDY, NOOO!" followed. He knew now that the deception had been carried out to the end. He waited until he heard the splash in the bay below before he dared to open his eyes once more. "Damn coward," Ertley wasn't even fazed in the least, "I knew his spine was too weak for this. Check that charge, Fleming; I want their drop to be smooth and instantaneous."

"Right," Trevor hurried over to the cage again. "Please Dad, don't do it!" Benjy pleaded tearfully with him, "You don't have to do this!"

Genuine regret crossed Trevor's face. "Believe me son, I don't really want to do it either," he said softly, "But your mother has to pay for all the trash she's thrown against me, and right now this is the only option."

"You can talk it over with her, please Dad, it doesn't have to come to this!" Adrian's soul was breaking as much as the boy's was as he heard all this.

"I'm sorry, Benjy, but this is the only way, and that's that!" Trevor firmly reasserted his position, "If it makes you feel any better, you'll probably see her again soon. I'm guessing the witch'll blow her brains out no more than ten days from now. Her life will be meaningless without…"

"Are they set or what, we haven't got all day!" Ertley yelled over, "Five minutes till this thing goes off."

"Right," Trevor adjusted some dials and walked back over to the white supremacist. Adrian took some deep breaths. He had almost made it to the top now. The question was how to take out both of them when they were heavily armed and he had just his wits—which he'd happily have traded at the moment for sufficient firepower. One thing he did have, though, was the element of surprise; neither man had noticed him so far. He pumped his wrists, ready for action.

It was then that it happened. There was a squawk as an albatross flew overhead. Seconds later, Adrian felt the moist stuff on his shoulder. He knew immediately what it was, and couldn't stop himself from groaning in disgust. Both Ertley and Trevor turned to look at the source of the sound. "YOU!" the latter shouted. He cocked his rifle, ignoring Benjy's shout of, "Dad, no!" and started firing away at the detective. "How many times do I have to warn you to stay out of what isn't your business, Monk!" he roared.

"This is very much my business, Trevor!" Adrian squatted low until the fugitive's clip was exhausted, "Do you really love that boy?" he pointed at the cage.

"What kind of stupid question is that, Monk?"

"If you really love him, you'll throw away that detonator and let him and Julie go, because this, Trevor, is just between you and me!" Adrian made the mistake of glancing down at the bay almost a thousand feet below him. He immediately seized up and moaned in fright.

"There's no argument here, Monk, this time I've won and you're not going to take any cheap shots on me!" Trevor broke out laughing at his foe's predicament, "It's over already!"

"Not on my watch…which, unfortunately, is broken," Adrian took deep breaths to try and calm his shot nerves, "But anyway, I've got backup, and they're not afraid to use force!"

"Oh really? Well, so are we!" Ertley spoke up. Adrian heard the sound of metal scraping. Too late he looked up to see the two men hefting trashcans. Moments later, a cascade of garbage spiraled down toward him. He gasped and retreated. "That's exactly why I've won too, Monk!" Ertley snarled, "Only the strong survive!"

"I've got news for you Ed, you're on of the weakest people on the planet!" Adrian shouted, feeling rather weak with trash all around him. This prompted Ertley to hurl his trashcan at him. Adrian just managed to duck it in time. "Fleming, drop them now!" Ertley told him, "Our time's almost up!"

"With pleasure," Trevor reached into his pocket for the cell phone detonator, "Anything to make our friend Mr. Monk squirm!"

"Not on my…broken…watch!" Adrian found himself shouting. The detective stepped backwards behind the trash can, which had lodged in the side of the cable and somehow kicked it up to the top of the tower, where it slammed into Trevor's face. The fugitive dropped the cell phone and stumbled back into Ertley, knocking him to the ground. Adrian breathed a sigh of relief and threaded his way through the garbage land mines to the very top of the towers. "He didn't hurt you, did he?" he called to the kids.

"Why'd he have to kill me dad?" Julie sobbed.

"No, that wasn't your dad, Julie, he's still dead, thank God," Adrian said, slapping himself when he realized he was only making matters worse again, "That man who just got shot, he was with them. The big bad racist paid him to impersonate your dad to break your mom's heart. We're really high up here," he shivered, finding it hard to keep his balance. There seemed to be water on all sides of him.

"I know," Benjy said, "Get us out of here."

"Sure, uh…" the ticking sound loomed large in Adrian's ears again, "If, if you'll just hang pat for a couple more minutes, I'll defuse this big bomb and let you out of there."

He approached the bomb. The count was now two and a half minutes. "OK, OK, there's a load of wires here," he said, examining the bomb, "Boy, they're expert builders. Uh, well, maybe I could, um, maybe it's plugged in somewhere here. I should really keep pliers on me…we're way too high up here."

"Yeah, it's really a long way down too, Monk," came Trevor's voice. Adrian spun to see he'd grasped the cell phone again. "For the love of God, Trevor, DON'T DO IT!" he cried out one last call for reason.

"Let's see how you like more pain in your life, Monk," was Trevor's response to this. The fugitive pressed the number 0 button. The C4 holding the cage to the bridge exploded, and it dropped out of sight to the sound of two terrified voices screaming "MR. MOOONK!"

"Hold on!" Adrian yelled. Against all of his better judgment, he ran toward the edge of the tower and dove off it after the cage. His eyes squinted half open, he scrunched his neck up; he knew well that whiplash had been what had killed Gwen Stacy when the Green Goblin had thrown her off the George Washington. Slowly he started catching up with the cage. When he was almost on top of it—only about a hundred feet from the road deck--he reached out and grabbed hold of the bars. Simultaneously, he reached his legs out and wrapped them around the bridge cable he knew was behind him. He and the cage slowed to an abrupt stop. "No need to worry, Mr. Monk's here," he said, "What's that…oh no, they painted the bridge yesterday!"

He could feel a distinct wet spot in his inseam that was definitely paint. "Are you out of your mind?" Julie had to ask, "You just jumped off one of the largest bridges in the country."

"I know, I must be legally insane, perhaps even schizophrenic," Adrian agreed. He burst into tears. "I'm going crazy, jumping off bridges; what was I thinking!" he howled, "Oh God, we're high up. HELLLLLLLPPPP! Somebody get us down! We're really high up! I promise I'll never tell another lie as long as I live!"

"Just who's saving who here?" Benjy had to ask.

"Monk!" came a familiar cry from the bay. Adrian dared to open his eyes all the way. He could see the light of a police barge speeding toward the bridge. A light was being shined up toward him. "I don't believe it, he's jumped off the top of the bridge," Disher could be heard saying to an associate, "Monk are you all right?"

"Do I look like I'm all right, lieutenant, get me down from here!" the detective cried out. The paint was seeping into his pants now.

"Just hold on a little longer Monk, we're going to bring the boat here underneath," Disher called to him. "Did you really jump off the bridge?"

"I know, it's amazing, just call me Spider-Monk," the detective shrugged in a rare humorous mood that contradicted his terror of being up high. "Talk about riding the movies," he commented, "I don't think we could get much closer to Sam Raimi's vision if we…"

"Watch out Mr. Monk!" Julie's warning came seconds too late, before a hard metallic object hit the detective in the side. "Damn you Monk!" Trevor roared, having slid down the cable after him, "You've ruined my plans for the umpteenth time!"

He walloped the detective with a large metal pipe. Tremendous pain seared Adrian's body, but he tried to ignore it as best he could. "And I'll keep ruining them until you learn your lesson," he said in defense. His legs were starting to slide. He wasn't sure how much longer he could hold out, especially now that his nemesis was smacking his legs with the pipe.

"You never know when to give up, do you?" Trevor bellowed, "I wouldn't have to be doing this if you'd taken the warnings in Chicago seriously!"

"There's no reason you have to be…"

"Shut your mouth!" the fugitive slugged Adrian across the face. He then started hitting the detective's fingers. Adrian strained hard to hold onto the cage, which had been starting to slip out of his grasp anyway. "They're innocent children, Trevor!" he begged, "If you want me, take me alone!"

"Sharona has to suffer, as do you!" Trevor was now consumed completely by rage, Adrian sadly realized, "So just let go, Monk, and this will all be over with."

"I'm not letting go, Trevor," Adrian took another look at the bay. The barge was only about halfway closer to the bridge. They'd be dead if he let go now.

"You'd better damn well let go, Monk!" Trevor pounded his fingers harder.

"I WON'T!" he couldn't hold on much longer.

"Then you'll join them at the bottom of the bay!" Trevor drew a pistol, but before he could fire, the sound of two police helicopters exploding overhead caught their attention. An all-black chopper had arrived on the seen and thrown down a ladder. "Hey, hey, hey!" Trevor's attention shifted back up to the tower as Ertley grabbed on and took off into the sky. "You were supposed to wait for me!" he fumed, scrambling to get back up the cable.

"You snooze, you loose, Fleming!" Ertley cockily called down.

Then, to the amazement of all, a new figure came out of nowhere and grabbed on to Ertley. "AMBROSE?" Adrian was in shock. His brother, actually coming out and climbing a bridge tower?

""You're not going anywhere, buddy!" Ambrose's voice echoed all over the bridge with unbelievable resolve.

"Get off me you damned super freak!" Ertley fired several shots at the instruction manual writer, which all missed. He was clearly struggling to hold on to the ladder under Ambrose's weight.

"Not on my life…or what passes for a life!" was Ambrose's response. Ertley couldn't hold on anymore. As he fell, he grabbed out for something else. A loud buzz rang out from the top of the tower. "Yes!" Adrian said softly. The terrorist had diffused his own bomb.

"NOOOOOOOO!" Ertley shrieked as he and Ambrose plummeted, "My dream! My…uh oh!"

"Uh oh!" Ambrose added, seeing they were headed for a collision with everyone below them.

"UH OH!" Adrian and Trevor said simultaneously. There was no way for them to get out of the way. Everyone collided and fell toward the bay. The cage was pulled from Adrian's hands. Frantically, he reached out for it in mid-air, and somehow managed to grasp it with one hand and grab on to the bottom of the walkway railing with his other hand. His fellow free fallers grabbed a hold of his legs. "Could you suck in your breaths a bit!" Adrian called at them, "Not so hard, Ertley, you're stretching the fibers!"

"You think I care about your pants, Monk?" the white supremacist couldn't help betraying his terror about the situation. "Come down and get me!" he yelled into his hand radio.

"Over me dead body they will!" Ambrose said defiantly.

"You may just get your wish!" Ertley snapped. He fired more shots at Ambrose, who somehow managed to avoid them and climbed up over his brother to the walkway and safety. "Fingers!" Adrian protested as Ambrose almost crushed them.

The sound of a helicopter buzzing by them filling the air. "Catch you all later!" Ertley could just barely be heard saying. He let go of Adrian's leg and dropped into the copter's cargo hold. It started rising up into the air. Adrian quietly cursed to himself. There was no way he'd be able to catch the mastermind now. But that was the least of his concerns. He could feel the cage starting to slip out of his grasp again. He dared to look down. Disher and the barge were almost there, but he couldn't hold it for as long as it would take. "Listen, guys," he told the kids, "I'm going to take a risk here. If you die, please forgive me."

"How can…?" Julie didn't get he chance to finish. "Randy, heads up!" Adrian utilized his last card and tossed the cage toward the barge seconds before he would have lost it. He watched with bated breath as it flew through the air toward the bay, then pumped his hand in delight as the children landed safely on the barge—right on top of Disher, in fact, knocking him senseless. "Yes!" the detective exclaimed in excitement.

"NO!" Trevor groaned, seeing his revenge thwarted. The fugitive drew a knife and thrust it at the detective. "You'll pay for screwing everything up again, Monk!" he roared.

"Guess again," came Ambrose's voice. Trevor was conked on the head with his own metal pipe. "Nobody messes with my brother!" the instruction manual writer declared, hauling him up to the walkway.

"I do!" Trevor grappled with him. Adrian took several deep breaths and swung himself up to the walkway. He collapsed onto the cement in time to watch Ambrose slug Trevor right in the face. "This is for destroying my house!" he shouted.

Trevor stumbled dazedly toward Adrian. "And this is for destroying everyone else's house!" Adrian punched him back toward Ambrose.

"And this is for hitting Natalie!" Ambrose slugged back to Adrian.

"And this is for locking us in that chamber to be irradiated!" Adrian hit him back to Ambrose.

"And this is for abusing the woman you swore to love for all eternity!" Ambrose landed a haymaker on his jaw.

"And this is for abusing the trust and love of the boy who forgave you for all your sins!" Adrian delivered a one-two combination punch to his nose, "That one's for trying to kill two innocent children just now!"

"AND THIS ONE'S FOR TRUDY!" both brothers decked him simultaneously. Trevor collapsed to the sidewalk, his face flowing with blood much like Sharona's had been after he'd beaten her. "Get up!" Adrian grabbed him by the middle, blood-free part of his shirt and pushed him against the railing.

"Don't kill me Monk! Don't kill me Monk!" the rage was gone from Trevor's voice, replaced now with abject fear.

"I'm not going to kill you, Trevor!" Adrian shouted, "There's a distinct line separating you from me, and I'm not going to cross it! But I AM going to get all the information I want, starting with how you were involved in the plot to kill my wife!"

"Okay, okay!" Trevor gasped, "Like you said back at the plant, I was the backup. In the event Tennyson's bomb failed to go off, I'd follow your wife to the drugstore and plant a second bomb on her car there. There was a manhole under the space she would have parked in; all I'd have to do was slip under it once I was done and no one would notice. I didn't really want to do it; I'm not a professional murderer!"

"That much is obvious," Ambrose commented, "Instead of locking up in the chamber and giving us ten whole minutes to come up with an escape plan, all you had to do was shoot us, and you would have won."

"I didn't want to be involved, Monk, you have to believe me!" Trevor pleaded with the detective, "I borrowed money off him; he told me he'd kill me if I didn't help out! He told me he'd forgive the debt if I helped kill her."

"So once again, you put your own well-being over the life of someone else. Very, very touching, Trevor," Adrian muttered out loud.

"Hey, it's not like I knew your wife!" Trevor protested, "As far as I knew, she was just some name on a list. I didn't know we'd be standing here now talking about it! If I did, I never would have agreed to it!"

"All right then, who hired you?" Adrian grilled him, "Who ordered you and Tennyson to do Trudy in?"

"I can't tell you that, Monk!" Trevor begged.

"You'd better tell me, Trevor!" Adrian barked, tightening his grip on his foe's shirt.

"Please Monk, don't make me!" the fugitive pleaded pathetically, "He knows I'm here; he'll have ways of finding me!"

"We can make sure you're safe, Trevor, I promise you," Adrian personally felt reluctant to promise anything to a man he hated, but he knew it was the right thing to do.

"You sure about that?"

"Yes," Ambrose still looked rather steamed himself, but he was nodding.

"All right then," Trevor sighed in resignation, "The six-fingered man, the one who hired Tennyson to blow up your wife, happens to be…"


	17. Merry Christmas, Mr Monk

It was at this, the least opportune of moments, that no fewer than a dozen bullets ripped into Trevor's back. He groaned and slumped over the railing. Adrian grabbed a hold of his pant leg before he could fall. "Up there," Ambrose pointed. Yet another helicopter had arrived on the scene, and it now fired a missile at Ertley's chopper. "OH MOTHER--!" Ertley managed to scream before both he and his escape chopper were blown into a million pieces. "Hey, not fair!" Adrian shouted at the intruder as it made a beeline for the coast and disappeared behind the hills. The detective could feel Trevor starting to slip out of his grasp. "Who was it?" he asked loudly, knowing this was probably his last chance, "Who ordered Trudy dead, Trevor?"

"It's…too…late…Monk!" a mortally wounded Trevor moaned. Seconds later, Adrian lost his grip. He watched with disappointment as the body of the man he'd come to loathe so much tumbled into the dark waters of the bay. "I was that close!" he lamented, kicking at the air in frustration, "I was THAT close!"

"But at least we know more of the puzzle," Ambrose tried to console him, "I for one feel a lot better now."

"I understand," Adrian nodded, "Thank, thank you for the assist, Ambrose. I don't think I could have done it without you."

"Hey, isn't that what brothers are for?" Ambrose asked, for once smiling, "Now could we get inside somewhere? My head's really spinning right now."

"I can live with that," Adrian wanted to get the albatross droppings and paint off his clothes quickly now. "Taxi," he flagged down one coming from the Oakland side of the bridge. "You know, it's kind of ironic justice at work here," he told Ambrose as they walked toward it together, "When we found Amanda Graystone in Chicago, she was reluctant to give us information at first, but after we prodded her a little bit, she was about to tell us Trevor was responsible seconds before he killed her. I can't help wondering," he looked up at the sky, "if Amanda enacted some kind of payback just now."

"Could have been," Ambrose stared up himself, "You never do know. Especially when it comes to tragic love."

* * *

Adrian stretched as he woke up the next morning. Christmas morning. He'd made it through the holiday despite the odds. And better yet was the fact, as he'd found out once he'd gotten back home, that Stottlemeyer had managed to catch all of the members of Ertley's Caucasian Provinces cell in an all-night dragnet. The streets of San Francisco were now safe again with the bombs successfully diffused.

He rolled over on his side to find Trudy lying next to him. "Merry Christmas, Trudy Ann Ellison Monk," he told her, not at all surprised to find her there.

"Merry Christmas to you too, Adrian Monk," she smiled at him, "Excellent work last night. I'd say that's your finest hour so far."

"You do?" he was awed, "Well, I'd do the same for you if I could, Trudy."

"I know," she told him, allowing him to lay his head in her lap, "You're a good man, Adrian. You deserve a good Christmas today, and I think you're going to get one."

"I would hope," he looked at her eternally young and beautiful face, "You know, I've been thinking, maybe once we finish opening the presents, if there are any presents, and after we eat, maybe I'll take everyone caroling today."

"So you'd consider caroling again?" she chuckled.

"Hey, I never told you while you were in this world, but that was one of the happiest nights of my life," he said with a rare deep smile, "I've come to realize now that I'd love to relive it."

"Well it looks like you'll have perfect weather for it," Trudy glanced toward the window. Adrian's jaw dropped after he followed her glance. "It's snowing!" he exclaimed, jumping out of bed and running to the window. At least five inches were on the ground already, and it was coming down hard. "It's snowing!" he repeated, "It hasn't snowed in San Francisco in over thirty years!" He looked back at Trudy. "You didn't by any chance engineer this, did you?"

"Oh maybe, maybe not," she said with a sly smile.

"You're up, Monk?" came Stottlemeyer's voice from outside the door. Adrian's eyes shot to the clock. It was quarter to eleven already—but then again, it had been close to one in the morning when he'd finally gotten to sleep.

"Yeah, uh, give me a minute," Adrian called out to him. He walked over to his nightstand and withdrew a present in green wrapping from inside. "Before I go, I got you a present this year," he told Trudy, unwrapping it for her, "A golden pen. Cost me five hundred dollars, but you deserve it. I'd give it to you, but obviously you're not going to be able to take it anywhere."

"It's the thought that counts," she eyed it with a big smile, "Thank you Adrian. It's good to know you still care. Now go on out and enjoy it with your friends."

"You'll still be here when I get back?" he asked as he walked toward the door.

"It's Christmas," she said, "Where else would I be?"

"Exactly," Adrian nodded and opened the door to an even bigger surprise. "MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. MONK!" shouted almost three dozen familiar people. What took Adrian most by surprise, however, was that his apartment had, while he'd slept, been thoroughly decorated from top to bottom, including an enormous Christmas tree in the study next to the bookcase. "Wow!" he exclaimed, thoroughly awed, "Wow! I never imagined…you all did this?"

"Well, we all sort of pitched in," Monica Waters was one of the people who'd arrived. And she was far from the only one Adrian knew personally. Looking around, he recognized just about everyone: Arleen Kassidy, Scott Gregorio, Michele Rivas, Sherry Judd, Garrett Price (whom Adrian had admittedly found himself uncomfortable being attached to during that traffic jam), Grandma Parlo, and numerous other people he'd met on cases. "How you all get here?" he asked, amazed.

"I called around," Dr. Kroger stepped out of the crowd, "I figured maybe you'd like more company this Christmas. You won't believe how readily they all signed up to come, Adrian. You should count yourself lucky to have touched so many people positively."

"I would have stopped by anyway," Kevin Dorfman spoke up from the corner, where he was helping himself to eggnog, "A good neighbor never lets another down during Christmas. Incidentally, I went to Wal-Mart to see if I could get you anything I thought would interest you,but since I know you're a bit tricky to buy for, I…"

"Hold it just one minute," Adrian walked into the study and stretched out on his toes to the top of the tree, where he straightened the star. "There, good," he nodded, "You were saying, Kevin?"

Kevin was now too preoccupied making a pass at Michele. "I hear you did a good job saving the day last night, Adrian," Dwight Ellison and his wife were also present, "You're still the man Trudy fell for."

"I try and do my best, Dad," Adrian told him, blushing. "I, I almost learned another big clue after I saved the day, but the suspect was killed before I could learn who did it. I'm still going to keep looking, though. There's got to be more info out there I haven't found yet."

"Keep up the good work, Adrian," Marsha patted him on the shoulder, "Dwight and I just know deep down that you'll find out in time and give us all peace."

"I'll do my best," he said. He took note a Sharona sitting quietly in the corner, watching with a smile as Benjy unwrapped his presents. She had barely let go of him since Disher had brought him and Julie safely back, the detective had noticed (for which he couldn't blame her at all). He walked toward her. "Feeling better today?" he asked, trying his best to sound sympathetic.

"At least now I know the nightmare's over," Sharona told him softly, "He'll never bother me again. I can't thank you enough for stopping him before he did what he threatened to do, Adrian."

"Nothing I wouldn't do for you, I guess," he said, putting a hand on her shoulder, "I suppose. I wish I'd remembered to get you a present," he voiced a concern he'd just realized.

"Bringing Benjy back safe, that's present enough for me," she told him, "He's more valuable to me than any hairdryer or mixer."

"I know," the detective added.

"Although," a new light had come into Sharona's eyes, "since you admit I did help you solve the case, I suppose you might have something for me after all. Need I remind you, you never gave me severance pay."

"Severance pay? Uh, well, you didn't really ask for it then, so…"

"We're not going through this again, Adrian," she sighed in frustration, "It only takes a little unleashing of the purse strings, that's all."

"I can't deduct from Natalie's paycheck, she'd stab me through the heart."

"I mean your money, Adrian, not…"

"There's presents here for you too, Mr. Monk," Benjy interceded before things could get out of control.

"For me?" Adrian was amazed. He squatted down on the floor and examined a stack of packages with his name on it. "Wait, I know what this one is," he said, holding up one with blue paper.

"You do?" Natalie had joined them in the corner.

"Yes. Was your family OK after what happened last night?" he asked, producing his nail clippers and ever so slowly cutting a perfectly straight line along the topmost piece of tape.

"Luckily those creeps took out much of their rage against the car," Natalie nodded, relieved, "Jonathan was hit once, but it wasn't fatal. I gave them the address, so once they're discharged, they'll be coming over here."

"OK, the more the merrier I guess," Adrian continued cutting. He'd gotten only a few inches open. "Allow me," Natalie took it from him and tore the paper off. "What, don't, now it's ruined!" Adrian protested. She gave him a silencing look. Inside was a large replica of his Jeopardy podium with the autographs of the crew and Alex Trebek, inscribed FROM ALL OF US TO OUR ONE-DAY CHAMP, BEST HOLIDAY WISHES. In the side was a note reading, DEAR ADRIAN, WHEN THE NEXT TOURNAMENT OF CHAMPIONS ROLLS AROUND, I'D ENJOY FACING OFF AGAINST YOU, SIGNED, KEN JENNINGS. "How nice of them to remember," the detective commented, taking the present's paper and cutting off the torn edges. "Is that really necessary?" Sharona had to ask him.

"I like it to be nice and even," Adrian told her. Once the edges were all even, he folded the paper in half four times, then gently dropped it into the nearest trashcan. "That's how you open Christmas presents."

He hefted the next one, an elongated package with red maple leafs on it, and opened it much the same way. Inside was a replica Mountie outfit, along with a card reading GREETINGS FROM TUKTOYUKTUK, NUNAVUT. Adrian opened the card to find a greeting for the man who'd helped in solve the case in Chicago saying, TO A NOBLE OFFICER OF THE LAW, HAPPY HOLIDAYS. CONTINUE MAINTAINING THE RIGHT, DETECTIVE MONK. CONSTABLE BENTON FRASER. "How nice," the detective said, holding the suit up, "Just what I always wanted. A Mountie suit."

"He must really like you, Monk," Disher entered the room, "I thought you'd be going crazy with stuff all over the place."

"Well, it's Christmas, Randy," Adrian told him, folding the uniform neatly back into the box, "Christmas is a special time of year, Trudy always said."

"I already thanked Adrian for saving the kids last night, now I'd like to thank you for making sure they didn't land in the bay," Sharona told the lieutenant.

"Oh, nothing I wouldn't do for you," Disher repeated Adrian's comment on the matter.

"Yeah sure," she said sarcastically.

"I should probably mention though," Disher leaned in close and whispered to her, "I was out with the sweeping units this morning to recover his body, and it doesn't seem to be where witnesses said he landed after he got shot." Noticing the freaked out look this caused to appear on her face, he added, "Which probably doesn't mean a thing. The tide moves pretty heavily through the bay, he probably just got swept out to sea."

"That's probably true," Ambrose had been eavesdropping, "He was shot fifteen times, and at least three vital organs were hit. It's 96.8 percent likely he was dead before he even hit the water."

The doorbell rang at this point. Stottlemeyer, who was closest to it, opened it up to reveal the Harts standing in the hall. "You folks have a good reason to be here?" he said with a slightly dark tinge to his voice.

"Is Detective Monk in?" Eric asked. Adrian looked up from the latest present he'd been opening—a pair of bowling shoes from Abby from Pross, along with a note telling him to use them well, and that she'd been goaded into giving them to him by Dr. Kroger—to see both he and his wife looked quite guilty. "Yes?" he asked, rising up.

"Look, Monk," Eric walked toward him, "Rochelle and I have been doing some thinking since yesterday, and maybe we were wrong about you. I think we were a little harsh on you to begin with, and maybe we've been a little too harsh on you through the years."

"Maybe?" Natalie raised on eyebrow.

"Well, probably," Rochelle admitted, "All that time we've blacklisted you, and you wanted our acceptance. You did give us closure with Clarissa, and we can't thank you enough for that. We were able to get to sleep for the first time in a long time last night, once your captain called and told us what had happened."

"At any rate, we'd like to bury the hatchet, if you'd forgive us, "Eric extended his hand. Adrian looked at it, then shook it firmly. "Why not?" he said, "After all, Christmas is the season of forgiveness. Wipe, wipe, wipe."

"Coming right up," Natalie handed it to him.

"So could we stay?" Rochelle looked around the apartment, also amazed at how well decorated it had been, "Not that you've got…"

"Sure, sure…let me get that button for you," Adrian fixed a button on her coat she'd failed to button up, "In fact, you're formally invite to go caroling with us after we eat."

"We're going caroling?" Stottlemeyer had come over and was frowning, "Don't you think that's a little out of your league, Monk?"

"It's what Trudy would do," Adrian told him, "Everybody," he spoke up loudly, causing everyone to turn to him, "Who's up for caroling later today?"

A healthy applause greeted this suggestion. "I, I can't," Ambrose said nervously, "I've been outside enough yesterday to last the next ten years."

"Hey, if you could make it outside to save my son, surely you could make it out for caroling," Sharona put her arm around him.

"And it's what Trudy would like to see," his brother added.

"Uh, well, um, maybe, uh, well, I might be able to squeeze in about five blocks or so," Ambrose conceded, "No guarantees, though, and that's probably my limit."

"The weather's certainly right," Karen agreed, looking at the still-falling snow outside the window, "We could stop by our place afterwards, I could get my camera, and…"

"Mr. Monk, this just got slipped under the door just now," Julie came running over clutching a card.

"What's this?" Adrian frowned as he slowly and meticulously opened it. What was inscribed on the card made his eyes widen: TO ADRIAN AND AMBROSE, THE TWO BEST SONS A PERSON COULD HAVE, GREAT JOB ON SAVING THE CITY LAST NIGHT. HOPE TO MEET YOU BOTH AGAIN SOON, DAD. "I don't believe it," the detective mumbled to himself, "How did he know where…?"

"I told you so," Ambrose told him matter-of-factually. The instruction manual writer ran to the door and threw it open. "Dad?" he yelled up and down the hall. After a minute of no response, he trudged back in. "Gone already," he lamented, "And we were this close again! Oh well, our paths are bound to meet eventually."

Adrian shook his head, but he was smiling as he did so. The sound of music revving up filled the air. "We waited all through the year," Disher started singing aloud with Bryan Adams on the CD he'd put on, prompting several other guests to join it, "for the day to appear, where we could live in harmony, "You know the time will come, peace on earth for everyone, and we can live forever, in as world where we are free—let it shine for you and me…"

Everyone had almost instinctively formed a circle and was now clapping. For once Adrian didn't mind the loud noise this made. Nor did he mind that his apartment was now very much claustrophobic with everyone bunched together. He was more than happy to join in with everyone else: "There's something about, Christmas time, something about Christmas time, that makes you wish it was Christmas everyday. To see the joy in the children's eyes, to see the old folks smile, says that Christmas will never go away." For the first time in his life, he now felt that he truly belonged, that people really did care. Looking out over the faces that smiled back at him when he gazed at them, he had his first feelings of peace since Trudy had left him. This Christmas was going to be one of the best days of his life—and for once, he wouldn't let germs, crowds or anything else get in the way of his happiness. It was, after all, Christmas.

THE END


End file.
